AUBURN – She thought it was cute that his feet hurt when he walked barefoot in the hayfield. He thought it was amazing that she knew how to milk cows and cut wood.

When Ed Webber and Sonja Christiansen first met in 1956, they were 10.

Christiansen was living in Freedom. Webber grew up in Portland and moved to the small farming town with his parents on their mission to spread God’s word.

While their parents studied the Bible together, Webber and Christiansen worked on the farm and picked daisies in their free time.

“I was her only friend, and she was mine,” said Webber, now 57.

In Christiansen’s mind, friends is all they were. Webber knew differently. But he didn’t dare say a word.

After four years in Freedom, Webber’s parents decided to take their mission to Connecticut. Webber cried hysterically as he waved goodbye from the back seat of his dad’s car.

It was three decades before the two would see each other again, and even longer before Christiansen would be available to be with him. Both of them married and had kids.

In 1974, after Webber divorced, he took a trip to Maine and found Christiansen in a bad marriage. She was living with her husband and two young boys in a trailer with no heat.

Webber told her to pack up her kids and leave with him. But Christiansen wasn’t ready.

“I realized that I loved him and he loved me and had for all those years, but what could I do?” she said. “I was married and I still believed that you marry forever.”

When Webber left that day, Christiansen was sure she’d never see him again. Webber knew it would simply take more time.

He showed up at Christiansen’s office in 1990, only to learn that she had divorced her first husband and married someone else.

Webber was disappointed but not discouraged.

Christiansen divorced her second husband in 1998. Her intention – even after Webber showed up at her house with a red bow around him – was to stay single forever.

It took a few more years for her to realize that she had spent decades burying her true feelings for the city boy with tender feet.

This past February, Webber took Christiansen to Mac’s Grill in Auburn. The waitress brought over a cake decorated with two old photographs of them as kids, a daisy and a diamond ring.

Married in June and now living in Auburn, Christiansen still wakes up some mornings and says to Webber, “Can you believe that after all of these years we are really together?”

He always grins and replies, “Yup.”