Years ago, when Madigan Beck was just a girl, one of the interns on her family’s community-supported agriculture farm in Osceola, Wis., made a big impression on her.
“She was a big sister figure to me,” said Ms. Beck, 28.
So, in 2013, when Ms. Beck was an undergraduate at Naropa University in Boulder, Colo., she was thrilled to be invited for a weekend to a nearby yoga retreat where her friend from the farm, Lindsey Ruder, was teaching.
And it was there that she met Benjamin Litwin, 32, who was originally from St. Paul, Minn.
“She introduced me to this guy with super-long, down-to-his-waist blond, curly hair,” Ms. Beck said. “He was working there, meditating and teaching yoga.”
Mr. Litwin had been at the ashram for several years at that point. When he saw Ms. Beck approaching the gateway, he sprinted to be one of the first to greet her at the entrance. “I was shocked at how beautiful she is,” he said.
Over the course of Ms. Beck’s weekend, she took one of Mr. Litwin’s classes. He blushed when interacting with her, she said, and couldn’t keep eye contact. “Both of us, we were a little shy,” she said.
When the weekend was over and she had returned home, she sent a thank-you note to her friend that included special thanks for Mr. Litwin. And she friended Mr. Litwin on Facebook.
“He sent the first message,” she said. “It was ‘Are you an early riser? Do you want to get tea or coffee some time?’ I said, ‘I’m an aspiring early riser,’ which was totally not true. But I knew he was getting up at 4 a.m. every day to meditate.”
The two agreed to lunch, and then, after flirtatious online conversation, agreed to a hangout that led to sledding on cardboard boxes filched from behind a local grocery.
The two soon had their first kiss on the porch of the little green house in Boulder where she lived.
Mr. Litwin left presents on her doorstep: homemade bagels, and, once, a turquoise-colored dress that she still wears. And as he was already a student at the University of Colorado, he decided within a few months to make time for the relationship by leaving the ashram and moving down the canyon to Boulder.
“We were out on a hike and I remember looking at her and feeling an overwhelming sense of joy and sense of really, genuinely, I could be myself around this person,” Mr. Litwin said. “I had never experienced that before in such an intense way. That’s really when I knew.”
Last fall, the couple decided to return to the Midwest from Seattle, where they had moved after leaving Colorado. In December, they arrived in St. Paul. Ms. Beck had always intended to return home, and “I kind of felt like it was time,” she said.
After the arrival of Covid-19 and stay-at-home orders, one of the houses at the farm, Buttermilk Falls C.S.A. and Folk School, became available, and so the couple moved one more time.
Mr. Litwin is now a senior sales associate for Zeus Living, a company with headquarters in San Francisco that finds temporary housing for business travelers, and he works from the farm in Osceola. She is a gardener and caregiver there, and delivers produce to the C.S.A. members.
On June 20, they were married at the farm, with Kristin A. Aitchison, a longtime friend of the Beck family who became a Universal Life minister for this event, officiating. The couple had hoped to have a big wedding, but because of the coronavirus pandemic, they limited their party to just 23 guests.
“It does connect our story to Madigan’s family story,” said Mr. Litwin of their wedding location. “It’s such a beautiful thing.”
