Prince Rupert thrift store worker chances upon late mother's letter in donated book
A fortuitous find tucked within the pages of an old recipe book has inspired a Prince Rupert thrift store employee to get closer to her family.
Retired postal worker Kathleen Palm found an old letter — postmarked 1966 — when she was flipping through the pages of a cookbook at the Paws and Claws Thrift Store in Prince Rupert early this week.
"I was looking at this great old cookbook — and you could tell it was old because of the lettering on the front of this beautiful hardcover book — and then there was a letter in it in an airmail envelope."
Palm took the letter up to the manager, Val Sutter, when things took an astonishing turn.
Sutter recognized the address — and the handwriting.
"I took the letter to my desk and noticed the person it was sent to was a very good close friend of my mother's," she explained.
"Upon that, I opened the envelope and inside it was a letter from my mother to this lady."
In the letter, Sutter's mother describes the everyday details of her life, peppered with comments about young Val and her brother.
"She mentions all of us," she said. "It was just surreal to get a letter after 50 years from my mother who's been gone from this world for at least 10."
When the thrift store gets a donation of books, Sutter says she doesn't normally sift through the contents. She would have easily missed the letter if not for Palm flipping through that precise book.
"There has to be reason why [this happened]. There's two thrift stores in town. Why would it come to this one? Why would a lady look in a book and find it? It's all these whys, right?"
After reading the letter, Sutter called her brother. He immediately came down to the store to see the letter and read it himself.
"We sat together and read it word for word," she said. "We felt like [our mother] was trying to give us some type of message."
For Val, the message was to spend more time with her younger brother and take better care of him.
"We need to be close and we need to be together and we need to look after each other."
Getting the letter, she said, was simply an "awesome" reminder.
With files from Daybreak North
