A Balloon With A Note Floated Two Hundred Miles And The Reply Broke Everyone's Heart
A little girl let it go without much hope. Months later, an envelope arrived.
At a school fair, a shy girl tied a note to a balloon and let it drift into the sky. The note asked, in careful handwriting, for whoever found it to please write back, because she found it hard to make friends.
Weeks passed with nothing. She had almost forgotten about it when a letter arrived, forwarded through the school, from an elderly widow who had found the deflated balloon caught in a hedge in her garden, a very long way away.
The widow, who lived alone and rarely spoke to anyone for days at a time, had written back because the note reached her on a particularly lonely afternoon. She said finding it felt like the world reminding her she still mattered.
The two became pen pals, then friends, then family in every way that counts. Their letters have filled a whole shoebox. Both say the same thing when asked about it: neither of them expected a single balloon to catch exactly the person who needed it most.
