“Don’t get cleaned up for us, we’re in our junky clothes,” Kim Busey says when she invites me over to sit and talk with her and her husband, Buzz Busey, on a sunny but chilly Saturday afternoon.

Kim greets me upon my arrival and leads me into her home, one with an amazing view that makes me pause and soak in the sight of the snow-covered mountain range visible from their living room. Buzz sits in his chair and smiles as I enter. Their smiles and their kindness have been their hallmark since they arrived in Bar K six years ago.

Buzz and Kim sit close to each other on their couch as they tell their love story, calmly and with the telltale signs of a life lived together. Finishing each other’s sentences, glances that convey more meaning than can be spoken, and a kind of stillness and peace that comes from a lifetime together.

They met at Penn State where Kim studied therapeutic recreation and Buzz was studying park administration and commercial recreation.

“We had a class together, a basic class that everybody in the Parks department had to take, a 101 kind of class.” They both speak this sentence, and smile, and look at each other, and fill in the blanks, so that the sentence comes out cohesively and smoothly with little separation of individual thought. “She stalked me, that’s when she started stalking me,” Buzz continues, as Kim rolls her eyes and tosses her hair.

“Here we go again,” she responds, and laughs, “because he was not smart enough to realize I was flirting, so I started stalking him.”

Again, Buzz does not disagree. Instead, he makes the gesture with his hand of something completely going over his head, and they laugh again, a relaxed comfortable laugh. Buzz eventually asked Kim out on a date.

“He asked me out, we went on a hike. It was our first date, a hike,” she said, “and three weeks later he moved in, into my apartment.” Kim is very matter of fact about this, and Buzz again simply nods and agrees.

“He had a home,” she says, laughing, “he just preferred it with me.”

“It was nicer at her place,” Buzz said.

“Yeah, I had water!” exclaims Kim.

Buzz continues, “I had no indoor plumbing, and no septic inside or anything like that, and it was all wood stoves.”

Asked how this had taken place, he explained, “It was free, free housing. So, I had free housing all four years at Penn State, except the time I was with her, which was the last year.” He was living with four of his friends in a lodge owned by a church where they held retreats, where they were the “caretakers.”

“It was a great party spot,” Buzz says, clarifying the situation. His eyes are now twice as big as they have ever been, and his smile matches the size of his eyes.

“Probably one of the most romantic things he ever did for me, because he did not have indoor plumbing,” Kim said,” he built me a BEAUTIFUL outhouse.”

“A two-seater!” adds Buzz.

“A two-seater,” Kim agrees.

“Back-to-back,” Buzz said, clarifying any design confusion, “it was not in the same room.”

Their living room is filled with wood furniture and other woodwork that Buzz has created over the years. At the time that he built the outhouse he says that his skills were more of a construction level of craftsmanship, but the furnishings in his home speak to a much higher degree of artisanship. He explains that the fine woodworking came at a much later time in his life.

They both graduated from Penn State, Kim in 1977 and Buzz in 1978, as Buzz had taken a gap year after high school. Kim started working in Philadelphia and so the two would take turns making the two-hour trip on the weekends to see each other, until Buzz graduated. They then moved together to Wheeling, West Virginia, where they both worked at a city park for five years.

They married while they were in Wheeling, in September of 1979, when they were both 27 years old. The park they worked in resembled more of a resort. According to Buzz, it included “a lodge with hundreds of rooms, a zoo, three golf courses, riding stables, mini golf, a couple lakes… I was in charge of the lake with boating and fishing.”

It was there that Buzz was tasked with building a huge railroad exhibit in a room that had previously housed an animatronic display of moving animals.

“They keyed in on him, and he was in charge of building an 1100 square foot miniature railroad,” explained Kim. It eventually was completed and included a working river and a hot air balloon that moved up and down. He went to local rock cliffs and made molds to incorporate into the design. The display lasted over forty years and was seen by millions of people before it was eventually dismantled.

The young couple had their first child, Kyle, in 1983. They realized that the resort was not going to adequately pay their bills and made the move to relocate to Atlanta. It was in Atlanta they had their second child, Nicholas.

From Atlanta, work life took the family to Ohio, and then Lancaster County, Pennsylvania. Kim my worked as a substitute teacher and other jobs while raising their boys, doing what was necessary to keep the family stable.

“I worked at a children’s museum for ten years, and I had own business from home,” she said, “I would write reports for school districts on textbook series that they were thinking of buying, and I would tell them how that textbook series matched their state or local requirements.”

Buzz, in time, worked his way up through what was Pfizer, and eventually retired from Johnson and Johnson in 2016. Kim talks about him being on call at the factory and being gone for days as he would work on the software that ran the factories.

Meanwhile, their adult children had moved to the Boulder area. Their son Nicholas was the first, coming in 2006, and then their son Kyle moved two years later.

They lived in Jamestown, Nederland, and in the Coal Creek area. Kyle bought the grow store above Blue Owl Books in Nederland before eventually opening Busey Brews in Nederland, and Nicholas lives in Boulder and is working in software.

Buzz and Kim both retired on April 1, 2016. They sold their house, packed their stuff into a U-Haul and moved in with their children. After a three-month whirlwind trip to Southeast Asia, they came back to Colorado and bought a house in the Bar K, where they are enjoying retirement. These days they travel and spend time with their children. Buzz still does his woodworking. Kim sings, something she had done since she was a child, and even recently performed a solo at Carnegie Hall

“It makes me feel good when she’s singing,” said Buzz, “I love to hear her sing… it makes me very happy.

“He’s a little tone deaf,” said Kim, smiling and patting him on his arm

As they recount their shared histories, which Kim calls boring and Buzz does little to deny or correct, a lifetime of shared experience is communicated through these glances and shared sentences. After a lifetime together, they have a calm, measured humor that comes from years of laughter, and a genuine life of love together.