@dli0031.builds: in september of 1996 my second grade teacher, mrs. hale, had all of us write a letter to ourselves thirty years in the future. she sealed them in front of us and promised she would mail them. we were seven. we believed her completely. then we forgot about it for thirty years. mrs. hale passed in 2019. i went to the service. i didn't think about the letters once. last tuesday there was an envelope in my mailbox addressed in her handwriting. every one of us knows her handwriting. the postmark was from last week. she has been gone for seven years. i stood in my driveway for a long time. inside was wide-ruled paper folded into a square, the way only a seven-year-old folds things. "dear me, i hope you have a dog and are not scared of the dark. i hope you still like drawing. mrs. hale says you will be great. she knows." there's a picture of a brown dog. i do have a dog. he's brown. i lost it. it took two days to find out how. her daughter jenny started crying before i finished my first sentence. she'd been getting calls all week. mrs. hale taught second grade in the same classroom for thirty-four years. every class wrote the letters. every class got the promise. and she kept every single one — in a closet at home, in boxes labeled with the year they were supposed to go out. when she got sick she made jenny promise to keep mailing them. there are fifteen boxes left. the last one is labeled 2041. jenny mails one box every september. mrs. hale addressed every envelope herself years ago, while she still could, so they'd look right. jenny's note tucked in with mine just said: "mom never broke a promise. neither will i." jenny set up a page on aSim where mrs. hale's students can post their letters and find each other. 140 of us so far. a lot of us have dogs. if you had mrs. hale — yours is coming. she wasn't going to forget you. #asim #teacher #secondgrade #timecapsule #sheknows

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Tuesday 15 September 2026 16:58:24 GMT