Our children got sunburns that afternoon by the pool, and later we got moonburns. Or that’s what their father called them that night during a 1970s state lodge trip.

He was a romantic.

A year earlier he’d put my engagement ring inside a candy bar wrapper, and whispered sweet nothings to me inside a movie theatre. Then afterwards he held my hand at the mall when I jumped down from a retainer wall, held me tight, and called me his Dancing Queen.

I told you he was a romantic.

I knew it all along, though a minister who’d counseled me also knew him and cautioned me.

Momma was against our marriage. Not because he was idealistic, but because he had four children, and I had one who was the youngest of the five.

My husband’s love for all of our children was a big turn-on.

You could hear the affection in his voice when he talked, laughed, and even when the stern teacher in him surfaced, and he took no notice that their eyes glazed over, or that they looked to the Heavens for help when the stern teacher in him surfaced.

It was his romantic moves with me in front of the children back then that made me squirm.

“Please don’t kiss me in front of the kids.”

“You think it’s better if they saw parents who argue?” he asked, then put his arms around me like a security blanket that I’d always wanted.

Needed.

Loved.

Those days seem like yesterday.

In between there were graduations, weddings, then weekends with our first two grandkids who we’d let jump on our king-size bed and have popcorn and apple juice.

Almost overnight those grandkids graduated from high school. They are now 37 and can still remember that grandpa could smell toy stores on their birth days, and grandma packed survival snacks for their trips with grandpa when they slept in teepees and had buffalo brains and eggs for breakfast.

Now our almost 50-year romance continues, but only in my memories.

I’ll never forget that moonburn night when I was in my late-twenties. Or every year for Valentine’s in my plus-size fifties when he bought me extra-small black teddy lingerie.

Don’t be shocked.

I told you he was a romantic.

Now you know he also had a vivid imagination.