Valentine’s Day gets sweeter with age

Every day is Valentine’s Day for Cliff and Lydia Goodwater.

“We’ve never had an argument or spoken a cross word to each other,” Cliff said recently at the couple’s home in Motley.

Both 90, the Goodwaters have been married since 2001; but have known each other since they were kids.

Lydia, nicknamed, ‘Sis,’ when she was just a toddler, grew up in the house she now shares with her husband. Her parents were Otto and Minnie Pribbenow. 

“There were 10 kids in my family...I was number seven,” she said. Apparently, her siblings complained that ‘Lydia’ was too hard to remember, so she was always simply known as ‘Sis.’ 

Meanwhile, Cliff’s family lived on a farm just down the road from the Pribbenows. “It was located where the Countryside Restaurant is now,” he said.

His parents, Edward and Pearl Goodwater, raised a total of twelve children.

“I remember they would come to our farm and we’d all go swimming at Leaning Tree on the Long Prairie River,” Cliff recalled of Sis and her siblings. 

Or, the Goodwater kids would walk to the Pribbenow place to play games in the back yard.

“We always had a lot of fun,” Sis recalled of those early days.

When Cliff was 12, his dad had a stroke, leaving Cliff the responsibility of taking care of the farm. Sis knew her share of work as well. Life wasn’t easy for either of them, but it would serve to make them stronger for other difficulties along the way.

Cliff and Sis both grew up worshiping at St. John Lutheran Church and both attended the Motley School. They were friends, but never dated during high school.

Their lives took different paths as they neared adulthood and the two lost touch over the years.

In 1942, Cliff moved away from Motley, working a variety of jobs in North Dakota and Excelsior, including a stint as a tugboat pilot on Lake Minnetonka.

Later on, he was a sergeant in the army, serving in the Philippines during WWII.

When he got out of the service, Cliff returned to the Twin Cities area, where he and his first wife raised their three children, Lynn, Kathleen and Richard. 

During those years, Cliff worked as a security police officer, a job he held until his retirement in 1992. 

After 31 years, his marriage dissolved and in 1980, Cliff married a second time. “Grace and I were together for 21 years, until she passed away. She had bone cancer.”

Sis, meanwhile, married at age 19; had a daughter, Nan; and spent almost 20 years living in Litchfield.

When her marriage did not work out, Sis moved back to Motley to care for her parents who were in poor health.

She had seen Cliff at a school reunion in 1974, but had not kept in touch with her childhood friend.

That changed in 2000.

“After Grace died, Sis’s brother, Dave, called to ask if I would come visit him in Fayetteville, N.C.,” Cliff said. “I told him I couldn’t drive all that way by myself and he told me, ‘Well, you call Sis. Maybe she’ll go with you.’”

Cliff called Sis and told her about her brother’s proposal. “She said, ‘When do we want to leave?’” he recalled.

They drove 2,000 miles in Cliff’s Dodge Spirit, chatting non-stop along the way. Neither one of them thought anything about it, Sis said. “Oh, no, we were just friends.”

A month later, the childhood friends made a trip to Utah to visit Sis’s daughter, Nan. “We were still just friends,” Sis insisted.

Somewhere along the line, “We might have kissed once,” Cliff shared.

Sis recalled the day she learned her brother John had passed away. She teared up when telling Cliff and he took her hand. At that point, she knew that they were now more than ‘just friends.’

On Sept. 8, 2001, Cliff and Lydia were married at St. John Lutheran Church in Motley, where they first knew each other as kids. Cliff recalled his memories of young Sis...long legs, pigtails flying in the air as she raced the other neighborhood children. “I always tell people that she ran so fast, it took me all these years to catch her,” Cliff joked.

Over the past 15 years, the sweethearts have been making happy memories together.

They enjoy eating meals together at home. “Cliff makes a wonderful oyster stew,” Sis shared. They also enjoy picking wild chokecherries and making  homemade jelly.

Neither of them likes to watch a lot of television, but they make an exception for the show, ‘Walker, Texas Ranger.’ “We both like that one,” Cliff says.

Giving back to the community is important to both Cliff and Sis and they believe doing things for others draws them closer to each other. “We’re both members of the Lions Club and used to do Meals on Wheels every week, until the program ended in Motley. I miss that, it makes you feel good to do something for someone else,” Cliff said.

They do some things on their own, which gives them something else to talk about over dinner. Sis helps out at various church functions and Cliff is active in the American Legion. He is a member of the Tri-County Post #124 and a life-time member of Post #1625 in Blaine.

Cliff and Sis are grateful to have found each other later on in life and hope to share many more Valentine’s Days together.

What’s the secret to their happy relationship?

“I think it’s important to know each other’s family backgrounds, to like the same things and to do things together,” Cliff said. “You have to be forgiving, too.”

Sis added, “You have to listen to what the other person says. That’s very important. Talk things out...don’t let a bad day get to you.”

And with that, Sis pours some freshly brewed coffee and passes around the peanut butter cookies Cliff just finished baking. Ah...life with your true love. How sweet it is.