Shortly after a pretty girl named Sofia flirted with Bernadino Valentin at a dance, he began showing up at her family’s home in Veracruz, Mexico, hoping to steal some time alone.

Sofia would put a flower in her hair before telling her mother she was going to wash dishes in the backyard. While she washed, they flirted.

“His conversation was really pretty and he was good looking,” Sofia said of that time in the spring of 1943. “Now he’s a little ugly.”

But when Sofia’s mother found out that Bernadino had proposed, she didn’t mince words.

“Her mom chased me out of the house with a machete,” Bernadino said in Spanish through a translator.

The couple will celebrate their 72nd wedding anniversary Friday in their Wilmington apartment, where they live with the help of Independence at Home caregivers who were hired five years ago to help with trips to the grocery store and other difficult tasks.

Bernardino, 95, and Sofia, 90, need walkers to get around. And Bernadino has been hard of hearing ever since a car accident many years ago.

“She said she has to scream at him because he’s hard of hearing,” caregiver Rocio Martinez said. “So he yells back at her: ‘I’m not deaf!’ They play around a lot.”

Their wedding anniversary marks the time when Sofia ran away to the woods to meet Bernadino without her family’s interference. He took her back to his hometown, on Mexico’s opposite coast in Jalisco, where they were married. Later, they returned to try to mend fences with Sofia’s family, but her mother’s anger at the betrayal never completely faded.

She didn’t want her daughter to marry someone from Jalisco, Sofia recalls. Her mother’s rejection was painful, but Sofia said she focused on her new family rather than dwell on it.

“I just thought: ‘In this ship, I sailed,’ ” she said.

Sofia and Bernadino went on with their lives. He transported sugar cane around the country, and she was soon pregnant.

“Neither went to school, and whatever they learned, they learned on their own,” Martinez said.

They lived with little money, raising five children while Bernadino traveled between sugar cane plantations and began seasonal treks to California to earn money as a farm worker. The family followed him there.

Somewhere along the line, Bernadino took up heavy drinking — a problem Sofia tried to lessen with her own homemade hangover cure — a meal with lots of spicy chillies.

“She’s been supportive of us being poor and all our trials and tribulations,” Bernadino said. “It goes both ways.”

The family moved to Long Beach before settling in Wilmington several decades ago.

Since 2009, they have each obtained U.S. citizenship. And their once-tumultuous relationship has settled into a peaceful friendship.

“Every now and then he gets stubborn and needs scolding, but now we’re just calm,” Sofia said. “We’re at peace. We get along fine.”