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By KRISTIN DAVIS
They were looking for sea glass, those translucent jewels of the water, worn smooth and round from years beneath the surface.
Jill Reid stored them in jars at home. Someday, she was going to make something with them.
It was mid-April, a cool, sunny day in northern Pennsylvania, the first nice weather in months. They came to the shore of Lake Erie to think, and relax, and see what treasures the water had surrendered.
Reid's daughter and 3-year-old granddaughter came along for a walk on the beach, just a narrow swath of land between the water and a steep bank. Winter storms had left it strewn with logs and debris, and the lake was still.
Up ahead, Reid spotted a tangle of ribbons wrapped around the limb of a jagged tree trunk.
She strolled toward the cluster and discovered a heap of deflated balloons. Tags, mostly faded and illegible, were attached to the ribbon.
But Reid could decipher a Web site: angelswhispers.org. She tore off the tag and stuck it in her coat pocket.
A storm and a celebrationTwo days later and 400 miles away, Jan Broom sat at her computer in a Leesburg hotel room, feeling very alone.
For months, Jan's work with a phone company had kept her away from her Spotsylvania County home five nights a week.
It was April, always a hard month for 50-year-old Jan and her husband, Jules.
They'd lost their only child, 23-year-old Shannon, on May 1, 1998, in a car accident.
Shannon, a blooming artist and Mary Washington College graduate, would have turned 30 on April 5.
Jan and Jules never stopped celebrating their daughter's birthday, or commemorating Heaven Day--the day she left them.
"Love is forever," Jan tells people. "It doesn't stop just because it changes forms. People do not have to say goodbye."
Jan sat at her computer, remembering. Remembering Shannon and this year's celebration.
The Brooms marked Shannon's birthday and Heaven Day together, on April 2.
The morning dawned stormy and windy, with heavy, slanting rains.
Jules barbecued in the backyard beneath an umbrella. The guests stayed inside, flipped through photo albums and watched home movies of Shannon growing up.
And there was heaven mail--balloons tied with ribbons and bookmarks and notes to Shannon. Each year, friends and family and neighbors set them adrift, watching them rise against the sky.
But the weather wasn't cooperating this time. The guests waited for pauses in the rain and took turns releasing balloons. There were 30 this year, a huge bouquet of iridescent latex.
They whipped in the wind, and Jan feared their soaring missives wouldn't soar at all. That the balloons would end up deflated and tangled in branches nearby.
At 2 p.m., Jillian, the 5-year-old daughter of Shannon's best friend, set the last bunch afloat.
There must have been 10 of them, with ribbons and notes all twisted together.
Usually, the balloons drift southeast, Jules said.
This time, the bundle headed northwest.
The family watched until the cluster became a speck against the clouds and disappeared.
Later, after everyone left, Jan and Jillian walked outside. Two huge rainbows arched across the sky.
The last seven years had been a blur. When you lose someone, Jan says, time becomes surreal.
But she and Jules have tried to make the best of things.
They became spokespeople for organ donation--their daughter had donated her organs. They reached out to other families who'd lost children. They began making bookmarks from Shannon's artwork and writings.
The Brooms call it "bookmark therapy," and they have given more than 100,000 to people all over the world.
But they still miss her. They are still lonely for Shannon's laugh and her hugs and her thoughtful homemade gifts.
And now, Jan sat alone in the Leesburg hotel room, thinking that being away from Jules and home didn't help.
Jan logged onto the Internet and scrolled through her e-mail. There was a message from angelswhispers.org, the Web site she created in memory of Shannon.
Jan figured a friend remembered the upcoming anniversary and wanted to say hello.
Instead, it was from a woman named Jill Reid, in Girard, Pa.
At first, Jan couldn't make sense of the message.
Walking along Lake Erie, thinking about the recent loss of a longtime friend to cancer, "I came across a cluster of old balloons " Reid wrote. "They came so far."
The heaven mail, Jan thought. Someone had found their heaven mail.
Replies to heaven mailIn 1999, a year after Shannon's accident, the Brooms set their first bundle of balloons afloat from the mountains.
A few weeks later, they got a reply from a young girl named Shannon who lived in Atlantic, a Virginia town south of Chincoteague.
Her father had found the bookmark, stamped with the Brooms' e-mail address, in a crab trap in the bay.
The girl and Jan corresponded for years.
The second response came from a man in King George County, also via e-mail.
Jan wrote back, asking him why he thought he had been "touched by an angel."
The man never answered.
"I think he thought I was a nut," Jan said with a laugh.
But balloons traveling across four states, all the way to the northeastern tip of Pennsylvania? And into the path of someone curious enough to dig further? To Jan, it seemed so unlikely. Miraculous.
Marc Spilde, a meteorologist with AccuWeather, explained the science of it. Helium-filled balloons pop when they reach the top of the atmosphere. Then they fall.
On especially windy days, balloons can travel great distances before popping, Spilde said. A warm wind would have pushed them north, toward Lake Erie.
Jan and Jill spoke on the phone earlier this month, and both women were startled by the ease of the conversation.
Jill's daughter is almost the same age Shannon was when she died.
"I felt, if it was me, I'd be curious if it ever got found," Jill said in a telephone interview. "I thought, I'm just going to let her know they were found."
Sometimes, Jan said, "things are too perfect to be coincidental."
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