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Five good things · Three minutes
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KINDNESS • Sunny Skyz
He prayed 19 years to meet his father. He did.He prayed for one thing with a rosary. It took 55 years.
Joshua Schneeloch spent 19 years in a German Catholic orphanage watching other children leave with new families, and prayed each day with his rosary to one day meet his father. About a year ago, his wife, Nicole Pavelka, handed him an Ancestry DNA kit. A genealogy professional traced a few cousins, then made the call he had waited a lifetime for. His biological father, Arthur Colbert, had been stationed in Kaiserslautern in 1969 and 1970 and never knew a child was born. "If I had known that I would've brought him back to the United States with me," Colbert said. When they met, Joshua walked over and put his rosary around his father's neck. On Saturday in Jefferson, Texas, he stepped into a room of more than 60 relatives meeting him for the first time. He had spent decades fearing he would be pushed away. Instead everyone in the room had come to welcome him. Read the full story → | |||
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KINDNESS • Upworthy
A 1929 letter found its family after 95 yearsA letter waited in a wall for 72 years. Then someone kept looking.
Michael Archer was gutting the last unrenovated closet in his London, Ontario home when a yellow letter fell into the rubble. It was dated August 13, 1929, and signed by Charles Slater, a man who worked Great Lakes freighters. Slater had written to his father from the twin cities that later became Thunder Bay, explaining he did not know when he would get home. "There's no grain coming out of the west," he wrote. That was two months before the stock market crash. The Archers tried to find Slater's family and got nowhere, so Christina Archer stored the letter for 25 years. Last week she posted about it online. Marisa Cooper, a local genealogist, was scrolling Facebook and saw it. Working backward through half-siblings and marriages, she found great-nephew Aaron Powers, who had never heard of his relative. "Oh my gosh, it's the long-lost uncle we've always wanted," his wife Laurie recalled him saying. Slater died in 1984, having recommended his father read All Quiet on the Western Front.
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KINDNESS • Good News Network
A whole day of digging, and the winning ticket survivedThe machine said non-payable. She believed it.
Sanitation workers in southern Italy spent a full day digging through a truckload of garbage last week to recover a lottery ticket worth a million euros. The winner had thrown it out by mistake. When she scanned it at her local tobacconist without checking the numbers, the machine flagged it as "non-payable," which can mean the ticket lost or that the prize is too large for a small shop to pay out. She assumed the worse of the two. Then a family member noticed the winning numbers were the ones she always played, tied to a loved one, and called to ask. By then the trash had been collected. Roberto Nicola Toscano, an administrator at the waste company SANB, traced the truck to a safety-equipped station and put his staff to work. They found the ticket, in his words, "miraculously still in one piece." She offered to cover the taxpayer cost of the search herself. Read the full story → | |||
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PROGRESS • Reasons to be Cheerful
1,000 doctors took turns. A town got its clinic back.The town tried everything to keep a doctor. Then someone called.
A network of traveling doctors has begun filling France's rural "medical deserts" one week at a time, and a small town in the Creuse department shows why the idea works. When Ajain's longtime family doctor retired in late 2020, the municipality of 1,000 people, two bakeries and a great many cows tried everything to recruit a replacement. National press coverage, promotional videos, formal lobbying. Nothing. Then a young doctor named Martial Jardel phoned the mayor with an unlikely pitch. Instead of asking a lot of a few doctors, ask a little of many. His nonprofit, Médecins Solidaires, recruits general practitioners to cover a rural clinic for a single week, then hands off to the next. The first center opened in Ajain in 2022. Since then, more than 1,000 doctors have signed up, 15 centers have opened, and 26,500 consultations have taken place. Ninety-nine percent of participating doctors say they want to return. Half already have.
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DELIGHT • Smithsonian Magazine
Every yard deserves art. His came from under the dirt.He thought he'd hit a fence post. He hadn't.
Greg Gatwood was digging in his San Francisco backyard this May when his shovel struck something hard. He figured it was an old fence post footing. After freeing the object with a pickax, the 65-year-old landscape contractor found himself face to face with a limestone bust of a woman, weighing roughly 150 pounds. "It's probably the most exciting thing I've ever dug up in a yard, and I've dug up a lot of things over the years," he told NBC Bay Area. His partner, Judy Gittelsohn, a professional painter, has since spoken with close to 50 people trying to identify the carver. She suspects the sculptor Ralph Stackpole or one of his students, whose old sculpture department sits across the street in Russian Hill. Nobody knows for certain how it ended up buried on the lot. Gatwood is building a pedestal for the backyard. "Every yard deserves a nice piece of garden art," he said. Read the full story → | |||
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One more thing — I’m putting together a small wall of reader notes for the website. If honeyletter has changed your mornings, hit reply and tell me. Say if I can quote you, first name and state.
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With love, The Editor
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