It’s a cold Saturday in December at the midtown Toronto home Wynne shares with Rounthwaite, 60. The first heavy snow of the season fell overnight and their backyard looks like a Christmas wonderland.

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It feels joyous. Wynne’s grandson Hugh, 7 weeks and deliciously cuddly, smiles in his sleep. Granddaughter Livvie twirls as she dances around the living room. As children do, she stresses that she is 4 and a half.

Wynne and Rounthwaite, who moved into this new home just recently, are in the kitchen preparing tea and laying out plates of shortbread and ginger cookies. They married in 2005 but prefer the term “partner” to “wife.”

“I waited 18 years for her,” says Rounthwaite. “Basically, from the time I met Kath in 1973, I was just waiting — through her marriage, through my (own) relationship (with a woman) — I just waited all those years.”

They met in 1973 when Rounthwaite interviewed Wynne for the job of floor proctor at Queen’s University, where Wynne was studying for a Bachelor of Arts.

“I was head proctor and all these girls came in — yeah-yeah-yeah, fine-fine-fine . . . bor-ing,” Rounthwaite recalls, “and then this woman walked into the room — and wow! She had this big personality (and) I thought, ‘This is going to be a very important person in my life. It was like she had an aura. It was like, ‘ka-boom.’ ”

“Oh, don’t use that,” Wynne says with a groan. “She always says that.”

Rounthwaite can’t resist ribbing her partner: “It was a golden aura.”

“My hair was just longer,” replies Wynne.

Amid the easy banter, Rounthwaite takes credit for Wynne’s name. “You just aren’t a Kathy,” she informs her, likely as she has a thousand times about the name Wynne used when they met. Rounthwaite insisted on calling her Kath.

Of a wait that lasted almost two decades, Rounthwaite says: “We had things to do (in 1973), Kath more than me because she had to get married and have three kids, and thank God she did, because we have Hugh and Livvie (Olivia) and Claire.”

She’s speaking of the three children of Wynne’s middle daughter Jessica, 32, and her husband, Stan, a Cree OPP officer from Timmins. Only Claire, 2, is absent today. Wynne’s other children are Christopher, 33, and Maggie, 29.

Baby Hugh isn’t sleeping much overnight, and Jessica is beat. She goes upstairs to take a nap, leaving Hugh in a baby carrier and Livvie still twirling.

Wynne married Phil Cowperthwaite in 1977 and moved to the Netherlands, where he worked for three years as an accountant. Christopher and Jessica were born there, Maggie after they returned to Canada.

Wynne grew up in Richmond Hill in a family that valued education, the United Church and respect for the family. Charles, so badly wounded in the war, became a general practitioner, as did his son and Wynne’s father, John.

“I never, ever heard him talk about the war,” says Wynne. “He was fairly frail with a terrible cough, and he was deaf.” He’d been a medic at the front and Wynne doesn’t believe he even had a gas mask. She adds: “Father was very proud of his dad.”

On the paternal side of the family, her great-uncle Arthur was head of biochemistry at the University of Toronto until the 1960s and his sister, her great-aunt Margaret, taught at Davisville Elementary for 30 years.

In Wynne’s family, nobody seems ordinary. Her mother, a lovely woman who grew up in Nassau, was orphaned at a young age and raised by relatives. She was a musician with a soprano voice and sang for Wallis Simpson and the Duke of Windsor, who was governor of the Bahamas during the Second World War. In Canada, where she married John Wynne, she sang on the CBC and in the revue Spring Thaw before having her four children.