MOCKSVILLE — "Where's my Bri?" Allison Brown moved through a crowd of Davie High School seniors gathered at the Brock Auditorium last month in search of a special someone. Brown, 63, and Brianna Covington, 18, had never met. But in a series of letters over the last few months, they shared their personal stories and found similar threads running through both their lives.
Whatever barriers may have separated them — their 45year age difference, their racial makeup (Covington is Black, Brown is white) — melted away. Finally, they laid eyes on each other. Hugs and tears followed.
"It's one of my top experiences," Brown reflected recently. "And I've got grandkids and everything." Not far away, Covington's classmate, Tania Arellano, and Anne Gould embraced and shed their own tears.
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Arellano said she felt like she and Gould had known each other for years, such was the power of their letters. "It was like meeting a daughter I hadn't seen in 15 years," said Gould, 62. Ashley Snider, an English teacher at Davie High, came up with the idea of the Senior2Senior pen pal project earlier this year.
The impetus was a first-semester assignment that had some of her students write "Letters from Santa" to children in the area. She asked students to handwrite the letters — no LOLs or emojis — just pen and paper. "They really struggled not only with the handwriting but in imagining what it would be like to receive a letter," Snider said.
"They don't often use th.