A 9-year-old boy found a long lost love letter addressed to his grandfather on Lake Murray in South Carolina.
Nolan Garrick wandered away from his family while on a fishing trip last Saturday and discovered an old glass screw-top bottle with a rolled-up letter inside, according to The State. Viki Garrick and her husband, Nolan's grandparents, opened the letter written on a yellowed paper towel and could only make out a few words.
"I wish I could see you...I love you so much...I love you, Diane," the letter read. It was addressed to someone whose name began with the letter M. Garrick recognized the signature and sent a picture of the letter to her friend Diane Bryant. Garrick said Bryant always signed her name that way.
Bryant confirmed that she wrote the letter and she had written it to Mike Rogers, Nolan's grandfather, The Herald reported.
"I said 'I knew exactly where that came from,'" Bryant said.
She wrote the letter 45 years ago when she was 13 years old at an overnight gathering with a group from her church around 1970. Rogers could not go to the gathering, so Bryant wrote the letter to him and stuffed it in a Dr. Pepper bottle and threw it in the lake.
"With my whole heart, I just knew one day he would find it," Bryant said. "I've thought about it through the years, thinking, 'I wonder if anyone ever found that bottle?'"
Bryant used to write love letters to Rogers often in those days, and she would sometimes write messages on balloons for fun often wondering who might find them.
Rogers, 58, and Bryant have stayed friends over the years. Bryant and her husband will have been married 40 years in June and collect antiques and love letters in their home. Now they have another to add.
