I’m not saying the peanut-butter pie had nothing to do with it.

But it was only the first step of the process by which my mother-in-law became one of my favorite people in the world.

On my first trip to Ruth and Harold Buckloh’s farm near Coldwater, Ohio, I arrived a long-haired pseudo-hippie college junior who wore love beads and loved peanut butter. But being from Michigan, I’d never been exposed to peanut butter in its most decadent form: the pie.

I apparently raved enough about it that Ruth made me an extra one to take back to school that Sunday. I consumed it that night in an act I later tried to sell as a demonstration of my early unwavering loyalty to her.

Ann and I had married by the time Harold introduced me to rural Buckeye culture by using the term “goose-drowner” to describe a particularly hard rain.

“Gully-washer” had given me a smile. But by conjuring up a rain so hard it would drown a goose, goose-drowner had me laughing uncontrollably. It tickled Harold that I’d never heard the term before. But he flat-out didn’t get why I got such a kick out of him pronounce grease as “greeeeeze,” a practice which, to me, makes the word sound as slick as the substance it describes.

In the face of my citified ignorance, my mother-in-law could only say, “My land.”

I was glad to make the two of them smile some time later while my wife and I were playing Aggravation with them. I revealed that every once in a while, when I looked at Ann, I could see some of her brother in her, and at those times, I had trouble getting interested in kissing her.

I’m not sure our marriage altogether pleased them, at first. But after showing I wasn’t afraid to work at buzzing wood on weekends to help them fill the furnace in winter, my stock rose a bit.

Ruth and I got to know one another better on the three trips we made together to Chicago. Used to country roads, Harold didn’t much care for driving on the Interstate Highway. That meant there was no chance he’d enter the seventh circle of traffic hell that is Chicago’s Dan Ryan Expressway.

So because I had a brother up there who lived in the suburb next to her brother, Ruth rode along with me. I learned not only what a pleasant person she was but what a fair-minded one. She didn’t expect you to agree with her about everything, and the absence of any judgmental tone created a space in which good will could grow.

During one of our Chicago trips, I was learning to sing “Who Stole My Monkey” for a band I was in, and she decided to thank me for the drive by making me a sock monkey.

Only months after she gave it to me did I learn how she despised that project. But I later took one for Ruth when I agreed to take her to a Mendon Union High School alumni gathering at which the speaker droned on for nearly as long as the school had been in existence, and the unpadded bleachers on which we sat turned to petrified wood.

When things work out between families, we become part of one another’s legends, just as we’re part of one another’s lives.

Harold was famous for being able to elude all his children’s efforts to disguise one of his perennial Christmas gifts. One of his stellar moments was when Ann and her sister Betty wrapped one up in a cardboard mailing tube. In a moment pregnant with drama, he hefted it up and said, “I’d say that might be flannel shirt.”

Harold called the margarine he put on his bread “salve,” call macaroni and cheese “gluey,” described a dense snowfall as “woolly” and managed to make a crunching sound while eating strawberries.

He also famously told a story about the time he’d killed a rabbit “with a stick on the run.” It’s still not clear to me whether only the rabbit was on the run or he was on the run, too. ( I recently have ruled out the stick.) The phrasing proved such a distraction to me that it was years before I appreciated the feat itself.

We all smile over the story of when, as a boy, Ann’s nephew Chad told Ruth everything tasted better at their place in the country, including, apparently, the store bought hot dogs that inspired his remark.

I made a couple of contributions to family lore myself by trying to pull a hay rake when the rake was engaged. After two or three of my game attempts, laughs told me I had about as much chance of moving the rake as I did of picking up a crowbar and moving the barn a foot or two.

Then again, every time my brother-in-law Jon brings this up, I’m able to mention the night when he awoke to the ringing of a telephone and ended up speaking clearly into the roots of a houseplant he’d jerked out of the planter beside his bed.

I know I was too citified to fully appreciate all the gifts my parents-in-law gave us: the extra spade and shovel I’ve used a thousand times; the cherry tree Harold transplanted in our back yard and that blossoms each spring; the chunk they removed from our mortgage after a year when crop prices were particularly good.

Harold has been gone nearly 20 years now. Ruth peacefully passed away on Monday, roughly five months after her 100th birthday and after years of telling my wife, in as stern a tone as a gentle woman could muster: “Now, Ann, I don’t want you to be sad when I die.”

We all are, of course. She was universally loved in the family. But her personal aversion to anyone “making a fuss” over her will always make me smile when it comes to mind.

I’ll always think of Ruth on a late Sunday afternoon or early evening in the kitchen of their farm house. After our car was packed and the kids rounded up for the trip home, we’d say a final goodbye.

She’d then turn toward the corner cupboard and reach for a plastic cup, usually a cup that came with the feed supplement they bought for their animals.

In it was their petty cash — a few dollars rolled up, along with some change in case somebody came by to buy eggs, honey or something of the sort.

There would ensue a brief argument in which she would insist that the price of gas or something we brought or the expense of raising our children in those days justified her passing along a little something to us.

Just as when she baked that extra peanut butter pie decades ago, she was always nickeling and diming us as we went out the door, trying to send us off with just a little more of her care and love before saying her final goodbye.