Everyone enjoys hearing a good love story around Valentine’s Day.
Jill and Allon Fish of Salisbury definitely have a unique story.
They met in 1976 while attending a Chamber of Commerce event at the University of Delaware. They both attended the event each summer for six years as part of a course.
Each summer at the event, Jill and Allon would enjoy their time together as friends and then go back to their separate lives.
Allon moved to Florida, got married, and had three children. He lived in Florida for 38 years while Jill still lived in Salisbury.
Allon’s wife passed away and he started searching for some of his friends from the Chamber of Commerce course. He ran into a classmate in Florida and asked if they had spoken to Jill. The classmate told Allon that Jill had passed away.
However, when Allon went to search for Jill’s obituary online, he did not find one. In fact, what he did find was a phone number so he gave it a try.
“It was after 9 pm at night in 2015 and I was sitting my bathrobe and I saw on the caller ID, ‘Allon Fish.’ I said ‘Oh, I am not going to answer it, I’m not going to answer it.’ And then I said, ‘Oh yes I am going to answer it,'” Jill says. “He started talking french to me – he’s a jokester. We talked for two hours and we both walked around our places after and pacing saying I don’t believe it. But I knew I was not gonna let that man go.”
Allon made plans to travel up and see Jill around the Christmas holiday. But Allon had a big question for Jill.
“We had gone to church, came home and talked, and we exchanged a couple gifts,” Jill says. “I opened his card and at the bottom it said, ‘Will you marry me?’ I cried and of course I said yes.”
The couple got married in April 2016 in Salisbury. Their one-year wedding anniversary is coming up and the newlyweds plan on spending a weekend in Lancaster, Pa.
It had been 34 years since Allon and Jill had spoken or seen each other before him traveling from Florida to Maryland to ask Jill to be his bride. Jill and Allon couldn’t be happier.
“It’s never too late,” Jill says. “We feel so blessed.”
