On my third birthday, we moved to this neighborhood. My first _________ is Arlene handing me strawberries from her garden. She and her husband, Bill, lived next door. They had no children. There weren’t any kids of my age nearby, so I mostly played in the yard _____. I was always _________ to Arlene and Bill when they were working in their garden. I think what _________ me to them is that they never got ___________ with listening to me and answering my questions. I also think they saw a lot of themselves in me—we were all lonely, anxious kids—and that may be _________ they always listened to me patiently. It was a wonderful _________.

When I was about five, I had an idea: _________ I took Bill and Arlene into our family as my grandparents. My parents _________ me to ask them and so I did. Arlene and Bill __________ cried and accepted. It is truly wonderful for a child ____________ her love and adults being so overjoyed to accept it.

Every child in this world __________ enthusiastically repaid love. From the day I __________ them, I called Bill and Arlene Grandpa and Grandma. Over the years, Bill and Arlene __________ me in all my dreams. They encouraged me to _______ college, even though I didn’t have the money to go. And when I was __________ to a university, they presented me with their __________. They told me they’d been __________ money since the day I called them grandparents. Four years later, I __________ and now work as an official.

Arlene passed away in 2013. Bill told me that Arlene thought the greatest __________ of her life was me, her granddaughter.

I owe a young lady a letter.

She wrote to me last week asking how I was, saying she was fine and that she was _________ the dress we sent for her birthday. Then she wrote, “Please _________.”

If my memory _________ me right, it is a decade since someone asked me to write back. We don’t write letters anymore. The _________ is gone; there’s nothing good in the _________ but advertisements and circulars.

When I was young my father took a new job. We only moved 200 miles, but it felt like we had been _________ from friends, extended family and all things _________ by two continents and an ocean. Long distance phone calls were_________ and expensive then, most often _________ for emergencies or bad news. But people wrote. Both my grandmothers and two of my great-aunts wrote to me. It was __________ that someone took an interest in a __________ kid. That someone would take the time to put pen to __________ and share their lives and __________ mine meant a lot, really. I spent many a Sunday evening straining to compose (用心写)__________ and well-written letters.

My mother was a great letter writer. I looked forward to her letters when I went to college and then working at the other end of the __________. When I married, had children and moved again, still far from home, she wrote __________. Letters were a way of closing the __________.

As phone calls became __________, then cheap, the flow of letters became __________ and eventually stopped. But that was not the case today. Today there was something truly special, which takes me to my most __________ task at hand, “Dear Audrey…”