Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds – Herodotus

A couple of weeks ago, longtime Evergreen resident Mary Noyes found a curious letter in her mailbox.

It was of the factory-ornamented variety – heavy, lilac-tinted paper thickly sprinkled with soft pastel flowers, folded to become its own envelope and carefully sealed in back with a bright red sticker. It was the kind of letter a young girl might send to another young girl, which didn’t surprise Mary, who, with her husband, David, raised three of them in their Hiwan Village home. The letter was also crisp, clean, and, apparently, undeliverable.

“Return to sender,” commanded the computer-generated label on the front. “No such number.”

Having a letter returned by the post office isn’t, by itself, especially curious. A bum address, inadequate postage, even lousy handwriting can bring a dead-end dispatch back for another try. In this case, however, her oldest daughter, Julie Matern – 1979 EHS grad, University of Northern Colorado Alumnus, wife, mother, and Berthoud, Colo., kindergarten teacher – had written the New Jersey mailing address of childhood friend Lisa Burgher legibly enough. The return address, on the other hand…

“I couldn’t understand why Julie used her maiden name,” she explains. “And I wondered why she used the Evergreen address instead of her own.”

Pondering those puzzles, Mary took a closer look at the postage.

“It was a 13-cent stamp with a Colorado Centennial postmark.”

Hmmm…curiouser and curiouser…

Noting that the sticker holding the letter closed appeared to be losing interest in the job, Mary released it from that commitment and started searching for clues in her daughter’s neat script. She didn’t have far to look.

“Loveland had a flash flood last night that killed 40 campers,” Julie wrote her friend, describing what sounded to Mary a lot like the Big Thompson flood of 1976. Turns out, that’s exactly what it was.

“Today is Colorado’s Centennial celebration,” Julie continued. “Whoopee! It seems like just another day to me.”

Realization swiftly dawning, Mary flipped back to the letter’s face. Sure enough, Julie’s mislaid missive had been cancelled on Aug. 4, 1976.

“She sent that letter 35 years ago,” smiles Mary, shaking her head in wonder. “Where has it been all this time?”

USPS spokesman Al DeSarro couldn’t say, but he’s willing to hazard a guess. “When these things happen, it’s often because somebody died and the letter was found unopened among their effects,” DeSarro says. “In this case, it may have fallen behind some equipment that was recently moved.”

In other words, while bobbing along atop a river of correspondence, Julie’s chatty dispatch likely jumped its banks and spent the next five and a half presidential administrations tucked between some colossal sorting machine and the wall. Given that USPS’s Colorado region processes up to 10 million pieces of mail daily, perhaps the real mystery is why that doesn’t happen more often.

“In my experience with 15 years in the Colorado region, I’ve only seen three cases like this,” DeSarro says. “As a matter of fact, three months ago we sent back a letter that was mailed in the 60s. It was mailed from Dallas to a service member at Lowry Air Force Base, and Lowry closed in 1994. But, the fact is, situations like this are very, very rare.”

Wherever Julie’s wayward communiqué has been during the last 35 years, by Easter Sunday it had only one more arm’s-length to go.

“When mom told me about it on the phone, I didn’t know what she was talking about,” laughs Julie, who brought her clan to celebrate the holiday at the old homestead and got a serving of memories to go with her ham and yams. Not surprisingly, Julie doesn’t recall mailing the curiosity in the first place. “I haven’t had any contact with Lisa for probably 25 years,” she says, tracing a finger over the postmark. “I remember the stationary, though. I was just about to start my sophomore year. It’s fun to see what was on my mind back then.”

“We had a lot of different families come stay with us this summer,” 15-year-old Julie wrote. “My favorites were the Edmonds. Of course, they have two sons, ages 16 and 18.”

But of all the interesting, amusing and surprising revelations contained in the youthful correspondence, the most curious – to Julie’s eye, at least – was not what she said so much as how she said it.

“I have to say,” she says, with modest satisfaction, “I had pretty nice penmanship.”