The Villages Daily Sun

THE VILLAGES - Grandchildren often have the capacity to surprise their grandparents. Sometimes, the U.S. Postal Service does, too.

Villager Cliff Hawthorn didn't know what to think when he pulled a legal-sized envelope out of his box at the Polo Ridge postal center on Feb. 11.

“I showed it to my wife and said, ‘What do you think? Should we open it?' ” Hawthorn said.

The letter was addressed to “GranD Pa,” in a childish scrawl in blue water marker. The name was near the top left corner where the return address should be. Above it, in the same scrawl, was the Hawthorns' street address.

“Vilages, FL” was written along the bottom left of the envelope, and their ZIP code, broken into units of three and two numbers, was centered approximately where the address is supposed to go.

When they flipped the letter over, their grandson's name was written; his first name, Grant, above his last, Wirth, both above the word “from.”

“Hawthorn,” in lower case, was centered along the bottom, and Grant's home phone number was written in large numbers in the center of the envelope.

Grant's name was the factor that persuaded them to open the mysterious missive.

Inside, Hawthorn found a crayon drawing of what he thought was a ship. Later Grant informed him by telephone that it was a police car. Grant, 5, had put his name on the drawing as he would have a school assignment.

The Hawthorns were stunned the letter reached them, especially when closer scrutiny of the Feb. 4 postmark revealed he had used 37-cent stamps.

“They never even requested the 2 cents,” Charlotte Hawthorn said.

The Hawthorns were in for another surprise Feb. 13 when Charlotte also received a letter from Grant.

Grant had written “GranD ma hawthorn” across the entire front of the envelope and her street address, city and ZIP on the reverse.

In the lower left corner on the face of the envelope, he had written “from” with Grant beside it and Wirth above Grant. His home phone number was scrawled in larger letters next to the last name.

After getting the second letter, they called their daughter, Cathy, to tell her that Grant's pictures had arrived.

“You mean they actually got there?” Wirth asked.

Wirth said Grant, a kindergartner, had drawn the pictures while she had been getting dressed for the day, and he had asked her how to spell many of the words. She hadn't realized he actually was addressing letters until he asked for stamps.

She offered to help him address new envelopes, but he was adamant about mailing the ones he had done by himself.

It was almost time to leave for school, Wirth said, so, convinced the letters had no chance of making it to her parents, she grabbed some 37-cent stamps.

Grant proudly dropped his letters into a mailbox on the way to school.

“We're always sending him something,” Charlotte Hawthorn said. “He loves to get mail. I guess he just decided to send us some mail.”

“He recognizes the big manila envelopes my parents send,” Wirth said.

Long aware of the significance of mail, Grant had been especially attentive when his class began learning about the mail system at school, Wirth said.

The Hawthorns are now firm believers the post office has a heart because taking the time to glean all the information to get the letters to them required extra effort on someone's part.

Lady Lake mail carrier J.D. Bare, who eventually put the letters into the Hawthorns' box, agreed. He said the bulk of the credit goes to the Ohio postal worker who, after the computer spit out the unreadable address, took the time to search for the ZIP code amid the disorganized information on the envelopes and add bar codes that routed them to Lady Lake.

“The computer's not looking at the address, it's reading the bar code,” he said.

The anonymous mail processor in Ohio who got the letters where they needed to be touched the Hawthorns' lives by making sure that two very special letters reached them.

“I just think whoever did that thought, ‘That's some kid wanting to get in touch with his grandparents,' ” Charlotte Hawthorn said.

Glenda Sanders is a features writer for the Daily Sun. She can be reached at 753-1119, ext. 9245, or at glenda.sanders@thevillagesmedia.com.