Love story: They have danced for decades – Don and Donna Ottosen celebrate 69th anniversary

Don and Donna Ottosen celebrated their 69th wedding anniversary March 18. But Donna received her gift two weeks earlier.

It was a silver locket with a picture of the couple tucked inside and the words “Forever in my heart” engraved on the back.

Her husband gave it to her early, because he didn’t know if he’d still be here.

Don has terminal cancer and is out of medical options. Now, they simply savor each moment together.

Those moments officially began in 1949, but Donna remembers a dance they attended while still in high school. She in Tekoa, Washington, he in Fairfield.

“He asked me to dance. I said no,” she recalled. “I really don’t know why.”

Fate gave them another chance to dance.

After graduation, Donna moved to Spokane and lived at the YWCA. One evening a friend said her cousin was coming into town to practice a song for a gig, and she was accompanying him. She invited Donna to come down and listen.

“I walked downstairs and tripped and fell right at his feet,” Donna said.

An ungraceful introduction to a man who would be her dance partner for the next 60-plus years.

“I thought it was funny,” Don recalled.

Donna thought it was something else.

“I went upstairs and asked my roommate, do you believe in love at first sight?” she said.

She and her roommates loved to dance and went out three nights a week. Don enjoyed dancing, too, and would often take the girls back to the Y afterward. His cousin made sure Donna always sat right next to him.

Then she took her matchmaking a step further. She invited Donna to her parents’ home for Easter dinner. And she invited Don and his family, too.

Don finally asked her out on Memorial Day, and by July he’d proposed.

“I loved her right away,” he said.

They picked March 18 as their wedding date to honor Donna’s brother. It was his birthday, and he’d been killed during World War ll.

Married life had a bit of a rocky start when Don came down with the flu on their wedding day.

“Then his car broke down,” Donna said.

No matter. They boarded a bus and visited Wenatchee, Ellensburg and Yakima on their honeymoon.

“I’d never been to those places,” she said.

They settled on his parents’ farm in Tekoa, and Don worked for a machinery company in Fairfield.

“I was a parts man and later went into sales,” he said.

He was also a farmer. It was in his blood. He milked the cows before work and Donna separated the milk and cared for the chickens.

“We sold eggs for grocery money,” she said.

They were quite far from town, but Donna didn’t mind the isolation. On dark winter days, she’d leave the porch light on for Don, who often had to leave his car on the road and snowshoe across the fields to make it home.

In 1952 their daughter, Lynne, was born, followed by a son, Kevin, in 1954.

When their daughter was about to start school, they moved into Fairfield, where their son, Lon, was born in 1958. Brian, born in 1961, completed the family.

Don and two friends bought the machinery company in 1967, and he worked there until he sold it in the 1980s and returned to full-time farming.

He farmed leased land by himself all over the area.

“I farmed the ground across the road,” he said, gesturing to the land across from their apartment on state Highway 27. That land is covered with houses now.

And he still had enough energy to dance twice a week.

“We liked to polka and jitterbug,” he said.

Donna smiled.

“He’s a real good waltzer, too.”

Don also kept singing, mostly performing at weddings and funerals.

“I’ve probably sung at 300 funerals,” he said.

Their son, Lon, bought their Fairfield home of 40 years, and the couple moved to Spokane. But Don would still drive out and mow the lawn. It was hard to give up working the land, though he had raised-bed gardens and 18 pots of flowers to tend to in town.

In 2011, Don was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. He went into remission, but three years later the disease returned.

“He beat that, too,” said Donna.

But in January they were told cancer had returned again, this time Mantle cell lymphoma.

“He told the doctor he wanted to make it to our 69th anniversary,” said Donna. “I said, why didn’t you say our 70th?”

At 89, Don has exhausted treatment options and is trying to get his house in order.

“I’ve been going through things I’ve collected over the years and deciding what to get rid of,” he said.

Donna thinks about how much she’ll miss him.

“He’s so good to me,” she said. “I tell everyone I’m spoiled.”

Though many of their conversations now begin with Donna saying, “When I’m alone …” Don is confident in her abilities.

“I’m not too worried about her,” he said.

He knows their time together here is drawing to a close, but he holds on to this hope:

“We’ll be together again someday,” he said.