To who may read these pages,
June 14th
My family and I just moved into this house four months ago, my son, my daughter, and myself. After the accident, I felt that we needed to have a fresh start, to try and rebuild our lives without all the old and painful memories. I believe now that we did not come to be in this house by chance, because living here was exactly what we all needed.
I fell in love with this house from the first time I saw it. Not just because it's a beautiful old house, but because for the first time in the longest time, I felt a real sense of Love and Home here.
Like anyone would do, as soon as we had settled in, I began to change little things here and there to help make this house feel more like our home. Fresh paint, new window coverings and a thousand other minor little things that would make it uniquely our own.
As soon the weather turned warm and sunny, I set out to tackle the seriously neglected yard. While clearing out the dead and weeds, I discovered the flower garden that wraps almost all the way around the back of the house. I began to dig up the old bulbs, which over the years had been allowed to become wildly overgrown, that's when I found this package.
It must have been buried there, underneath all those flower bulbs and weeds, for quite some time. The outer wrappings were quite decayed and brittle. I took it over to the table under the big tree in the back, out of the mid-day sun, to investigate the mysterious bundle.
You hear all the time about people moving into an older house and finding fortunes hidden inside a wall or under a staircase and even buried in the yard.
I must admit that the thought did cross my mind that I may have found something of that nature. What I found that day, as I unfolded the many layers of tattered old news paper, was a gift that had once been fondly and thoughtfully wrapped in Christmas paper, then intentionally placed deep beneath the flowers. Not for me, but for someone whom hasn't been able to receive it yet.
At the center of this parcel, I found a bundle of letters, all neatly tied with a bright red ribbon and a plastic sprig of mistletoe tied in the knot.
I sat and read every single letter that day. It was almost as if, for that brief moment, I was allowed to visit another time and to share in the lives of people that I will adore for the rest of my days. What the package contains is truly a fortune. A fortune of the heart and soul.