Sept 23, 2015: 37 years and no longer counting

Quince.

This is the blog post I've dreaded writing, but the time has come. On the morning of Sept. 23, exactly 37 years after I met my husband, he passed away peacefully after a brief illness.

The thing I will miss the most about him - and thing that he kept to the very end - was his quirky sense of humor.

Even when he was in the emergency room, he joked with the nurses. Someone asked if I was his wife, and he said, "No, that's my girlfriend. Don't tell my wife!"

I was legally his wife, for sure, but in my heart we were still boyfriend and girlfriend, in our carefree 20's, and deeply in love.

He once told me that it was his goal to make me laugh every day. He certainly did made me laugh a lot. Sometimes it was a little snort, sometimes it was a giggle, sometimes it was an eye-rolling groan. And sometimes it was a howler, where I splorted and laughed and giggled and had to catch my breath from laughing so hard.

One of the last howlers was when I served him a freshly-made slice of pie and as he was eating it he asked what it was. I told him it was a peach and quince pie.

He paused just a second or two, tilted his head, poked at the pink-colored fruit in the pie, and said, "So, this is a quince-idence?"

Yum