After all these years

It had taken Elsie Earle and Ella Penney nearly 50 years to meet face-to-face.

"She just put her two arms right around me," Ms. Earle said. "It was just the same as family."

Ms. Earle, of L'Anse au Loup, and Ms. Penney, who is originally from Southern Bay but now lives in Summerville, near Clarenville, had been penpals when they were about 10-years-old.

The two started writing one another when Ms. Earle's older sister, Jesse, told her about listings for pen pals in the Family Herald (now the Newfoundland Herald).

In fact - Ms. Earle's mother, Rose Linstead, and Ms. Penney's aunt, Marble Vivian, were penpals and met face-to-face for the first time after 38 years.

As it turns out, Ms. Earle and Ms. Penney beat that time comfortably.

They wrote describing what life was like where they were from, and what school was like in the fall, and what summer had been like, and Christmas.

They would write about berrypicking, helping their parents at the fishery.

"Her life was the about the same as what ours was," Ms. Earle said. "Life there was about the same as it was here."

In 1966, Ms. Earle ordered herself and Ms. Penney a New Testament Bible from a Sunday school paper in the United States.

They kept in close touch for the following seven years, mailing each other letters each month until Ms. Penney had to leave her hometown to go to school.

"Almost the same as you'd do through the Internet, only now you can do it a bit more often; perhaps once a month we'd get a letter from them," Ms. Earle said.

They didn't speak to one another until earlier this month, when Ms. Earle and her husband, Derrick, and Ms. Penney and her husband, Lin, met at a Tim Horton's in Clarenville to catch up on all the lost time.

They reminisced there for three hours.

"We were talking about growing up and we were going over some of the things we wrote back and forth, then she told me about her family, about her mother and her father, then she told me about her children that she had and where they was at and what they're doing now, and I was telling her about the same thing, about my family," Ms. Earle said.

Last January, Ms. Penney decided, out of curiosity, to search for Ms. Earle through Facebook.

"She was just wondering, to see if I was still out there, and just in the matter of a couple of hours (we reconnected)," Ms. Earle said.

The two had kept in touch over the phone throughout the winter, and when the Earles needed to make a trip to St. John's, the two decided now was the best time.

Such is the convenience of technology these days.

Quite different from the days of mailing letters, Ms. Earle said.

"I think it was more exciting then, just because we had to wait for the mail," she said.

"Then we used to be more anxious; we'd always be waiting for the mail to come," she laughed, "wondering, after you sent a letter, you'd give it two weeks: 'I wonder now will I get a letter from my pen pal today.' And she told me she was the exact same thing."

During the meeting in Clarenville, Ms. Penney produced an old memento.

She asked, 'Do you remember something you sent me when I was only about 12-years-old?'

'Yeah', Elsie said. 'I do'.

'I got it here in my purse', Ms. Penney said, revealing the New Testament Bible, with the date, 1966, still marked on the inside cover.

'Oh my God', Elsie said, 'you still got that! Mine's gone for long ago. I don't even know what happened to mine'.

'Well I still got it. I read that for years; when I went to school, I used to take it, and when I'd read it in the night time I'd put it up and under my pillow for the next night. I'm going to have that for the rest of me days'.