
I wrote a letter to my sixth grade class in Southern Illinois when my family moved to Southern California in the 1950s. My hometown of White Hall even published my letter in the local paper. Years and years later (at least 50 years later), I managed to track that letter down and get a copy. The letters I wish that I’d saved, though, were those every student in my class sent me in reply to mine. Some of them didn’t have my address correct (I was living in a 27-foot trailer with no indoor plumbing when we moved to a run-down trailer park), but because there were so many letters with at least my name correct, the postal carrier knew to deliver them all to me. Oh, what fun it would be to read those letters today as a 78-year-old Elder Chick.
Oh yes it would! A few years ago I found letters from a childhood friend after my family had moved away when I was in third grade. What a treasure. We wrote till college and then drifted apart. She died young of breast cancer and when I ran into a relative of hers after I’d found the letters, I offered them to her and can’t remember now if she took them! I do know that I don’t have them anymore, but the memory of that long correspondence stays fresh.