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Lasting love for Atlantic Canada couple who met through crate of pineapple juice in 1979

Lasting love for Atlantic Canada couple who met through crate of pineapple juice in 1979

The following is not an April Fools’ joke. It’s just a sweet love story involving a crate of pineapple juice.

In 1979, Gordon MacDonald, then 27, was stocking shelves at a Sydney, Nova Scotia, grocery store when he spotted a note placed inside a box of pineapple-juice cans.

It was from Gilda Feliciano, 29, a woman who was working at a Del Monte factory in the Philippines.

“I cut the case open…and I found this little piece of paper,” MacDonald told CTVNews.ca. “I opened it up and it had a note on it saying ‘pen pal wanted,’ and the date had been 11 months since the letter had been written.”

The grocery clerk wrote Feliciano back, starting what was to become a long-distance friendship. For two-and-a-half years, MacDonald and Feliciano wrote letters — eventually every day — which led to exchanging audio tapes and making long-distance phone calls.

Then, without having met Feliciano in person, MacDonald proposed.

“MacDonald, 29, leaves for the Philippines this week to wed a woman he knows only from pictures, letters, tape recordings and a fateful encounter three years ago with a carton of juice cans,” read a story from August 12, 1982.

The couple wed on August 25, 1982, in the city of Cagayan de Oro, then returned to Canada together. They had a daughter a year later. They are still happily married, settled in Fredericton, New Brunswick.

“I take a lot of pride in the story,” the couple’s daughter, Melissa Ashley, told CTVNews.ca. “Not many other people can say that their parents met in that unique way.”

Read the entire story here.