In September of 1960, Mrs. Hattaway's fourth-grade class at Pecan Ridge Elementary School in Georgia was assigned pen pals from a fourth-grade class in Minnesota, and nine-year-old Annie Lou Weems drew a boy named Dennis Oberg, and for three years they wrote to each other every two weeks, until one day his letters stopped.
Sixty-three years later, a widow now, Annie Lou found all thirty-one of them in a shoebox in her attic, tied with a faded blue hair ribbon.
She sat down on the attic floor in the heat and read every one.
Annie Lou Pritchard was seventy-five. She had lived in Pecan Ridge, Georgia, her whole life, except for two years at the teachers college in Milledgeville that she had not finished. She had worked at the bank on the square for thirty-nine years. She had married a peanut farmer named Wayne Pritchard in 1971, and they had been happy, and he had died in January of a heart attack in the barn.
Her daughter had been after her all summer to clean out the attic.
She had not expected to find a boy from Minnesota in it.
His first letter was written in pencil on wide-ruled school paper, in the careful, crooked printing of a nine-year-old.
Dear Annie Lou, My name is Dennis Oberg. I am 9. I live on a dairy farm near Lake Wilmer Minnesota. We have 42 cows. I have a dog named Skip. It snows here a lot. What is Georgia like? Do you have snow? Your friend, Dennis.
She had written back that Georgia did not have snow, hardly ever, but it had peaches and peanuts and pecans, and that it was so hot in summer you could fry an egg on the hood of her daddy's truck, which she had seen her cousin do.
He had written back that he did not believe her.
That was how it started.
For three years, they wrote every two weeks.
He told her about the snow, and the cows, and ice fishing on Lake Wilmer with his father, sitting in a little wooden house on the ice with a stove in it. He sent her a pressed leaf from a sugar maple, red as fire. He sent her a photograph of himself and Skip in front of a snowdrift taller than the barn door.
She told him about Sunday dinner at her grandmother's, and the creek behind their house, and the first time she saw a television. She mailed him a pecan in an envelope, which arrived crushed. In the summer of 1961, she and her mother mailed him a small jar of homemade peach preserves wrapped in four layers of newspaper, and it arrived whole, and he wrote back that it was the best thing he had ever tasted in his life.
He drew her pictures of the farm. She drew him pictures of peaches.
In sixth grade, in the spring of 1963, he wrote that his mother was sick.
Then he wrote that she was in the hospital in Minneapolis.
Then, after a letter in May, he did not write again.
Annie Lou had written to him four more times that summer. She remembered that now, sitting on the attic floor. She had cried about it. Her mother had said boys were like that at twelve. That he had probably just gotten busy.
She had stopped writing in the fall.
Then she had grown up, and gone to Milledgeville, and come home, and married Wayne, and raised two children, and worked at the bank. And she had not thought about Dennis Oberg in fifty years.
But here he was. Thirty-one letters in a shoebox. A pressed maple leaf, brown now and crumbling. A photograph of a skinny boy and a dog in front of a snowdrift.
She held the last letter in her hands for a long time.
Mama is still in the hospital. Daddy drives to Minneapolis every Sunday. I milk the cows by myself now before school. I am sorry this letter is short. Your friend always, Dennis.
That night, at her kitchen table, Annie Lou did something she would not have done a year ago. Before Wayne died. Before the house got so quiet.
She took out a sheet of her good stationery, the cream-colored kind with her initials, and a pen, and she wrote a letter.
Dear Dennis, You will not remember me. My name was Annie Lou Weems. We were pen pals from 1960 to 1963. I found your letters in my attic today. All thirty-one. I read every one. I wanted to tell you I am sorry about your mother. I never knew what happened. I hope you had a good life. I hope you still have snow. Your friend, Annie Lou Weems Pritchard, Pecan Ridge, Georgia.
She did not know his address. She did not have a computer. So she simply wrote on the envelope, the way she had when she was nine years old:
Dennis Oberg. Lake Wilmer, Minnesota.
And she put a stamp on it and mailed it the next morning, and told herself it would come back marked undeliverable, and that it did not matter.
It did not come back.
Three weeks went by. Then four. She stopped watching the mailbox. It was foolish, she told herself. A seventy-five-year-old widow writing to a boy who had not answered in sixty-three years.
On the first Saturday in November, there was a long white envelope in her mailbox, with a Minnesota postmark.
It was not handwritten. It was typed. And in the upper left corner, there was a printed return address.
Lake Wilmer Elementary School. Georgia Pen Pal Program. Established 1986.
Annie Lou stood at her mailbox at the end of the driveway for a long time, in the cool November sun.
Then she opened it.
Inside was one sheet of paper, handwritten in blue ink in an old man's steady hand.
The first line said: Dear Annie Lou, I never stopped writing to Georgia.