They met at a church supper in Concord, New Hampshire, when she was helping clear plates and he was pretending he knew how to make coffee.
He asked her to dance two weeks later at a fire hall fundraiser. She said yes because he made her laugh, and because he seemed like the kind of man who would still be there when life got hard. She was right.
They raised three children in a small house that always needed something fixed. The roof leaked one spring, the furnace quit during a January cold snap, and there were years when vacations meant packing sandwiches and driving to the lake for the day.
But there was always supper on the table, birthdays remembered, grandchildren welcomed, and one more chair pulled up when someone needed a place to belong.
New Hampshire is where they built their ordinary, beautiful life — not all at once, but year by year, bill by bill, prayer by prayer, and Sunday by Sunday.