Cousin helped bridge gap for him to ask her out
Jessica Donahue was not up for horsing around in her volunteer position, but for Steven Anderson she broke the rules.
Jessica volunteered with a horse rescue organization that was run by Stephen’s aunt, while she was in high school in Lonoke in 2009.
“The number one rule was ‘don’t date the volunteers,’” Jessica says.
Steven was shy, and he hung back and watched Jessica from afar.
“As much as I wanted to talk to her I just couldn’t bring myself to do it,” he says.
His cousin picked up on his crush and told Jessica how he felt about her.
Steven went to a different high school from Jessica, but they saw each other several times during the week and on weekends, too, as she helped with cleaning stalls, exercising and feeding horses and raising money for the organization. Getting him to say more than a few words to her at a time was still a challenge, she says.
“It was kind of hard to break him in,” she says. “His cousin was very outgoing and I think that kind of helped bridge the gap.”
They started hanging out together, sometimes just the two of them, though the majority of their time together was still spent at the rescue.
“We hid it for as long as we could,” Jessica says. “I didn’t want to get kicked out of the rescue because I loved it, and I didn’t want him to get in trouble.”
Steven’s aunt eventually came around, but their romance was short-lived.
“We broke up because of stupid reasons,” he says.
A few years later, after he had moved to Florida to help care for his grandparents, he and Jessica revived their communications.
“We had stayed friends,” Jessica says. “It took some time, but I slowly started talking to him again.”
In 2017, Steven moved back to Arkansas, in part to be near Jessica.
Jessica, though, had just gotten a cancer diagnosis, and she was reticent about restarting a romance.
“I did not want to date for a while. I didn’t want to put that burden on anyone, and I didn’t want to get my hopes up,” she says. “I was taking care of my grandparents, doing treatments, working … there was just a lot going on.”
Steven prepared to buy a house and he involved Jessica in the process.
“Neither one of us knew exactly what was going to happen but I still involved her and I ended up closing on it and took her to the closing with me,” he says.
A year or so later, Steven made plans for them to meet some friends at Peebles Farm in Augusta and see the fields of sunflowers. He scheduled a photographer to get pictures of them there. He tucked the engagement ring he was going to give Jessica inside his boot where she couldn’t see.
“It rained on my parade,” Steven says.
There was a literal downpour.
“He was in a bad mood,” Jessica says. “I was like, ‘What’s going on?’ Because that’s unusual for him.”
She suggested they go home, thinking maybe he was tired and not for a minute suspecting he was preparing to propose.
With their farm outing rained out, Jessica and Steven decided to play cards at the home of some friends who were aware of his intentions. Jessica noticed they all acted a bit strange as Steven ushered her outside, onto a deck with a scenic overhang.
“We went out there and one of her good friends was out there, behind her so she didn’t see the camera,” says Steven, who was so nervous he dropped the engagement ring as he was offering it to her, though thankfully it did not go through a crack and fall the two stories below.
They were married on Nov. 22, 2019, at Bella Terra Estates in Cabot.
On their wedding day, Jessica and Steven recorded video of each reading a letter they had written to the other.
“I remember the day we met like it was yesterday, you sitting up on a fence with your shirt off thinking you were the coolest drink of water around. You were the man God has prepared for me and you complete me in so many ways,” Jessica read.
Her late grandfather, she read, would have loved Steven.
“The part that would have made him love you is that even though you got scared, you never ran. You grabbed my hand and said you would love me through it all,” she says.
That was also the day Jessica told Steven her cancer had gone into remission.
“I had a scan I think two weeks before our wedding and found out I was clear,” she says. The Andersons own Broken A Ranch in Lonoke. They specialize in grass-fed beef and fresh eggs.
Jessica’s cancer returned shortly after she and Steven were married.
“It’s just something we take as it comes. He picks up my slack. If there’s a day where I’m just not there, he’s got it,” Jessica says. “We’ve been through a lot together. It’s been crazy, but I wouldn’t change any of it. Everything happens for a reason.”