THETFORD — The blue air mail envelope that Anne Cook picked up from the Thetford Center post office last week bore a familiar name.

But it was a name from her past. Cook lived in Donegal, Ireland, in the early 1990s and visited with Judith Hoad regularly for Chinese medicine treatments and for friendship.

“She was quite an interesting and dynamic lady,” Cook said Monday.

After Cook moved back to the Upper Valley to take care of her grandchildren, she kept in touch with Hoad.

Back then, you wrote by hand, licked a stamp, went to the post office and sent your letter on its mysterious way.

The envelope Cook claimed last week was waylaid somehow and had taken 25 years to reach her from Tunisia, where Hoad and her husband, the late Jeremiah Hoad, a well-known oil painter, visited regularly.

“It’s a very curious thing,” Cook said, “because first of all it was taped up, because it had been opened. I had to use scissors very carefully to open it.”

Inside, there was no letter, but a clump of stamps, canceled and cut from their envelopes: Tunisian, Chinese and English stamps, Cook said.

Also inside was part of an envelope addressed to Cook from a friend in China. “How that got in with Judith’s envelope, I have no idea,” Cook said, adding, “there’s a tiny bit of logic to it, but I’m not sure how much.”

The U.S. Postal Service had little information to offer. Rank-and-file employees aren’t allowed to talk to reporters, even to describe how they felt in handing a long-delayed letter to a longtime patron. It’s likely that the letter fell out of the “mailstream” between sender and recipient, said Stephen Doherty, a Boston-based spokesman for the Postal Service.

“I handle all media inquiries,” Doherty said, “so that our front-line employees can do the important work of moving the mail uninterrupted.” The post office found Cook via Facebook; though she doesn’t use it, her daughter does.

Cook suspects her old friend would have enclosed a letter that might have explained the stamps.

“I was disappointed that there wasn’t a letter from Judith,” Cook said. “She wrote beautifully,” and “always had something interesting to say. I was looking forward to hearing from Judith from way in the past, but it was not to be.”

Hoad might still write beautifully. Cook doesn’t use the internet much, but a search for Judith Hoad finds an interview with her from December, still living on the remote stretch of Irish coast where Cook visited her. Hoad’s husband, who was 13 years her senior, died in 1999. (An email message sent to Judith Hoad this week received no reply.)

To get to their cottage, Cook said, she followed an uphill track that passed through a sheep fence, taking care to close the gate behind her so the sheep didn’t get out. If she saw three white water bottles on the way up, she collected them and took them with her, as that was the Hoads’ only source of water, from a well in a nearby village. Then she crossed through another gate close to the cottage.

The view, from a bluff overlooking the ocean, was gorgeous, Cook said. Not a bad thing to have called to mind by an otherwise mysterious message.

Alex Hanson can be reached at ahanson@vnews.com or 603-727-3207.

]]>