The Letters a Stranger Wrote to Keep Me Alive Inside

When I shipped to basic training I did not expect mail. I had aged out of foster care two years earlier and the truth was there was nobody back home whose job it was to think about me. That sounds sadder than it felt at the time. I was used to it. You learn to travel light in more ways than one.

But mail call in basic is a merciless thing. Every single day the drill sergeant reads out names and hands over envelopes, and every single day you watch other guys light up over a note from mom or a photo from a girlfriend, and every single day your name does not get called. I told myself I did not care. I got very good at looking busy with my boots during mail call.

One of the drill sergeants noticed. He was not a soft man. But he noticed, and without making any kind of scene about it, he put my name into some volunteer program that connects recruits with letter writers, people who sign up to make sure nobody goes through training feeling like they dropped off the face of the earth.

Her name was Miss Adeline. That is how she signed every letter, Miss Adeline, in handwriting so neat it looked printed. She was a retired schoolteacher, seventy-something, from a small town I had never heard of. And she wrote to me like she had known me my whole life.

Her letters were not dramatic. She told me about her tomato garden and the deer that kept eating it. She told me about the church potluck and whose casserole was a war crime. She asked about my day and actually seemed to want to know. And every letter, without fail, ended the same way. I am proud of you, and I am praying you home. Signed, Miss Adeline.

I read those letters until they fell apart at the folds. During the worst days of training, when I was cold and exhausted and wondering what on earth I was doing there, I would think about a little old lady in a garden somewhere being proud of me, and it was enough. It was more than enough. It was the first time in my life someone was proud of me on purpose.

We wrote through all of basic. Then through my first duty station. Then, a couple of years later, through a deployment that turned out to be the hardest thing I have ever done, to a place and a set of days I do not talk about much. Her letters found me even there, forwarded through the mail system, arriving weeks late and worth waiting for. In the worst stretch, when I saw things that changed the shape of who I was, it was Miss Adeline's tomatoes and her terrible-casserole gossip that reminded me an ordinary, gentle world still existed and was waiting for me to come back to it.

She never asked for anything. She never once mentioned money or made it weird or preachy. She just kept being proud of me and kept praying me home, year after year, a stranger who decided a kid she had never met was worth her time and her stamps.

I finally met her in person after that deployment. I drove eleven hours to a little white house with a tomato garden out back exactly like she had described. She was smaller than I imagined and she hugged me like she had been doing it my whole life. We sat on her porch and she showed me the deer damage and fed me a casserole that was, I am happy to report, excellent.

She is gone now. She passed a few years back, peacefully, in that same little house. I was one of the people who carried her. I do not have a lot of family, but I had Miss Adeline, and she had me, and that turned out to be plenty.

If you ever get the chance to write to a soldier who has nobody, do it. You have no idea. You could be somebody's whole reason to keep standing up. She was mine.