Letters, seemingly insignificant pieces of paper on the pages of which were written entire life stories.

Pavao

Petar

My Gramps was the gentle soul of the family, as mom always said. Rough and cracked hands that hugged the softest.

Gramps Pavo was a postman and his job was to carry letters from one hand to another. But he did more than deliver correspondence. Gramps Pavo wove connections. This is a story about how his mail, eagerly awaited by two young souls, became the invisible thread that eventually brought them together.

In the time of our grandparents, there were no social networks, mobile phones or anything like that. Then it was letters. Seemingly insignificant pieces of paper on the pages of which entire life stories were written.

And then, at that time, a young man wrote love letters every day, my grandfather passed them on, and somewhere far away a happy girl received them and answered them continuously.

Those letters were eagerly awaited for days standing in front of the gates of their houses. Dida crossed distances so that one love would live. And in the winter, in the rain, through the fog, and even at the time when the two were miles apart, but their hearts were just as close. Dida's hands carried that love and brought it to the final meeting. They brought her all the way to union before God.

The two spent more than 40 years together, thanks to the honest hands around the little man.

And we, Dida's family, heard that story only recently when we happened to meet that girl, now an old grandmother, on All Saints' Day when she was bringing flowers to her late husband, just as he had done to her.

I, my grandfather's granddaughter who never had the opportunity to meet him, can only say that the love that he carried heartily on his arms for years still lives in the heart of a loving grandmother.

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