MARIE AND DAVID STURGILL enjoy a moment of light conversation in the living room of their Piney Creek home. They will celebrate their 62nd wedding anniversary May 17.

Sturgills credit good humor for a successful marriage

David Sturgill says that one of the main things that has kept him and his wife, Marie, together in the more than 60 years that they have been married is humor.

"About 25 years ago, I was fertilizing the grass in our backyard with some pretty high-nitrogen fertilizer," the 87-year-old David Sturgill said in recalling an example of this humor. "And I know that the message I intended to write using the fertilizer in the grass was ‘picked up,' because that area became greener than the rest of the grass."

What David Sturgill had done was to celebrate the couple's anniversary for that year by writing "I Love You, Marie" on the grass in one area of the backyard, using fertilizer, at their Piney Creek home.

"I told her, ‘This year, you're going to have to come out into the backyard to get your anniversary card,'" Sturgill joked in a Feb. 9 interview at the couple's home, which is located near Piney Creek Elementary School. His 83-year-old wife noted that she had taken pictures of this unique way of celebrating the couple's anniversary using a standard 35-millimeter camera, however, that the last pictures of the "decorated" backyard had long been lost.

David and Marie Sturgill will celebrate their 62nd wedding anniversary May 17. The two spent a large portion of their growing-up years in Piney Creek, where Marie Sturgill's father owned a small country store where the students at Piney Creek School hung out during their free periods, and David Sturgill's father,

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