The Letter That Waited Fifty Years
By Storyora Team | July 14, 2025 | True Stories
Honestly, this isn’t the kind of story you read and then forget. It’s the kind that lingers — in the soft corners of memory, in that old box under your bed, or in the rusted lock of a mailbox that hasn’t been opened since 1975. This is the story of a letter. A real one. A letter that waited fifty years to be read. And the people it waited for? Well, their lives were never quite the same after that.
The Letter
In April of 1975, Margaret Anne Simmons sat at her grandmother’s oak kitchen table in Spokane, Washington. She was 24, restless, and convinced that love — true love — only happened in movies or books. That was before Tom. Before he kissed her outside the train station in the rain and told her he’d come back. That night, Margaret wrote him a letter. Handwritten. Folded twice. Sealed with a red wax stamp she had found in a drawer of forgotten things.
She mailed it the next morning. Except it never reached him. Not in 1975, not in the years after. Life moved on. Tom never wrote back. And Margaret… she learned to stop asking why. Or at least, she tried.
The Discovery
Fast forward to 2024. Yep, nearly five decades later.
A man named Leo McCrae, who had just purchased a small fixer-upper cottage outside Spokane, was tearing down an old partition wall when a weathered envelope fluttered to the floor. It was sealed. Addressed in faded ink to “Thomas L. Everett – 205 Glenwood Ave.”
"I almost threw it away," Leo said in an interview. "It was yellowed, brittle. But something about the handwriting stopped me."
Leo did what most of us would do in that moment — he Googled. And that’s how he found Tom Everett, now 73, living in a senior community just 12 miles away.
The Reunion
When Tom first held the letter, his hands shook. His voice caught in his throat. “I thought she forgot about me,” he whispered. “All these years…”
The next call was to Margaret. She was in Arizona, living with her daughter. And yes — she cried when she heard his name. She thought he’d just vanished. Maybe met someone else. Maybe changed his mind. But it wasn’t that. It was a wall. A lost letter. A twist of fate.
What the Letter Said
We were given permission to share an excerpt of the letter. It's short, but powerful:
"Tom, if you’re reading this, it means I did something brave. I told the truth. I’m scared. But I love you. And I think that matters more than being afraid."
Simple. Honest. Heartbreaking. She never knew he didn’t receive it. He never knew she waited. And yet — somehow — the letter waited too. Until it was finally time.
Why This Story Matters
Look, we all lose things. Time, letters, people. We lose track of what matters. But stories like this? They remind us that love is a thread. Fragile, yes. But stronger than most of us realize. It winds through years, through silence, through walls — literally — and sometimes, it finds its way back.
Tom and Margaret met again, in person, in late 2024. They hugged. They cried. They laughed about their gray hair. And they started writing new letters. To each other. Every week.
Final Thoughts
There’s probably a letter like this in every attic, every dusty drawer. A word never said. A truth never shared. Maybe you should write one. Maybe you already did.
And maybe… just maybe… it’s waiting to be read.
Related Stories:
0 Comments