Annie Lou read the letter standing at the mailbox. Then she walked back up the driveway, sat down on the porch steps, and read it again.
Dear Annie Lou, I never stopped writing to Georgia.
You probably don't understand that. Let me explain.
My mother died in June of 1963. I was twelve. I came home from the funeral and found your four letters on the kitchen table, where Dad had put them. I could not open them. I could not write to anybody. I could not do much of anything that summer except milk the cows. By the time I could, it was winter, and I was ashamed of how long it had been. So I never wrote back. I have been sorry about that for sixty-three years.
I grew up. I went to the teachers college in St. Cloud. In 1975, I came home to Lake Wilmer and taught fourth grade at the same elementary school I went to, for thirty-four years. I married a good woman named Carol. She passed in 2020.
In 1986, I started a pen pal program for my fourth graders. I wrote to the principal of every elementary school in Georgia until one of them wrote back. It was Pecan Ridge.
Annie Lou put the letter down on her knee.
She sat on the porch steps for a long time.
Pecan Ridge Elementary. Her old school. Where her own children had gone. Where her granddaughter, Kaylee, had gone, in 2005.
She remembered, suddenly and clearly, Kaylee at nine years old at the kitchen table, writing a letter to a girl in Minnesota. Asking Annie Lou how to spell "peaches."
She picked up the letter again.
For forty years, my fourth graders in Lake Wilmer wrote to fourth graders in Pecan Ridge. I retired in 2009, but I still volunteer with the program. We've exchanged something like twenty thousand letters. My students have mailed maple leaves to Georgia every fall. Your students have mailed us pecans. They still arrive crushed.
I never told anyone why it had to be Pecan Ridge. My wife knew. That's all.
I have your letters. All thirty-five of them, including the four I never opened. I opened them last night, after yours came. I am sorry I made you wait sixty-three years for an answer.
Your friend always, Dennis.
P.S. I still have snow. About three feet of it by January.
P.P.S. The peach preserves were still the best thing I ever tasted.
Annie Lou called her granddaughter that night.
Kaylee was thirty now, a nurse in Macon. She listened to the whole story on the phone without saying a word. When Annie Lou finished, there was a long silence.
"Grandma," Kaylee said slowly. "My pen pal in fourth grade. Her teacher's name was Mr. Oberg. He sent our whole class a box of maple leaves at Thanksgiving. He wrote a note to each of us." She paused. "I still have mine."
Annie Lou sat at her kitchen table with the phone to her ear and could not say anything at all.
She wrote back the next morning, on her cream-colored stationery.
Then he wrote back. Then she did. Every two weeks, the way they had when they were nine.
He told her about the farm, which his nephew ran now, and the cows, which were down to twenty, and the little wooden ice house on Lake Wilmer, which he still put out every January. She told him about Wayne, and the bank, and her grandchildren, and the creek behind her house, which still ran. He sent her a pressed maple leaf, red as fire. She sent him a pecan, in a padded envelope this time.
It arrived whole. He wrote back that he did not believe it.
In his fifth letter, in late December, he wrote something different.
Annie Lou, I'm seventy-five years old. I have written to Georgia for forty years and never once been there. My daughter says if I don't go now, I'm a fool. She's bought me a plane ticket to Atlanta for the second week of February. If you would rather I didn't come, say so, and I won't. But I would very much like to meet the girl who said you could fry an egg on a truck.
Annie Lou read it at her kitchen table four times.
Then she went to the pantry and took down a jar of peach preserves from the summer. Her own recipe. Her mother's recipe.
She wrapped it in four layers of newspaper.
And she mailed it to Minnesota, with a note.
Come.
He came on the twelfth of February, a gray, mild Georgia day, fifty-eight degrees.
Annie Lou drove to the Atlanta airport herself, two hours each way, with her daughter in the passenger seat, because her daughter would not let her go alone. She stood at the bottom of the escalator at baggage claim in her good navy coat, holding a hand-lettered sign the way she had seen people do in movies.
DENNIS OBERG. LAKE WILMER, MINNESOTA.
He came down the escalator in a heavy winter parka, much too warm for Georgia, carrying a canvas bag. A tall, thin old man with white hair and glasses and a Minnesota Twins cap.
He saw the sign. He stopped at the bottom of the escalator.
Then he reached into the canvas bag and took out a shoebox, tied with a piece of twine, and held it up.
"Thirty-five," he said. "I counted them on the plane."
Annie Lou laughed. She could not help it. She put down the sign.
"Thirty-one," she said, and held up hers.
On Monday morning, Dennis Oberg visited Pecan Ridge Elementary School for the first time in his life.
The fourth-grade teacher had arranged it. Twenty-two children sat cross-legged on the carpet in front of him, every one of them with a letter from a pen pal in Lake Wilmer in their cubby.
He told them about the snow. He told them about the ice fishing house. He told them that in 1960, a girl in this very school had told him you could fry an egg on the hood of a truck, and he had not believed her.
Then he looked at Annie Lou, standing in the back of the classroom by the door, in her good navy coat.
"Is it true?" one of the children asked. "Can you fry an egg on a truck?"
"I don't know," Dennis said. "I'm staying till August to find out."