Love letter in a bottle finds its way to Virginia Beach couple starting new chapter

VIRGINIA BEACH — Ida Billingsley walks on the beach every day, watching dolphins swim by and looking for seashells.

On Wednesday, as she was heading north, she saw a glass bottle at the water’s edge near 26th Street.

“It was all sandy and wet and had foam all around it,” Billingsley, 51, said. “I was just going to leave it there.”

She kept walking, but then decided to turn around and pick it up. Right away, she noticed it had a piece of paper rolled up inside of it and a wax seal on top.

Giddy with excitement, she brought it back to her apartment and asked her husband, Shawn, to guess what she had found.

“Not another shell,” he said, brushing her off.

“No, it’s a message in a bottle!” she told him.

At first, the Billingsleys weren’t sure if they should open it, so they sought the advice of friends on Facebook. Within a couple of hours, Shawn broke the seal with pliers and used a pair of tweezers to pull the paper out.

It contained a love letter handwritten in cursive by a man to his wife. At the bottom of the letter, in red, are the names Jordan and Marquise and a date: “8.12.2019.”

The Billingsleys were astonished. Ida’s birthday is Aug. 12.

“It really makes me wonder about if there’s something bigger out there, that she just happened to be walking by,” Shawn, 51, said in a recent interview.

Ida also believes it was meant to be.

“We’re starting over, my husband and I are,” she said.

They’ve been married for 30 years, and for much of that time, Shawn served in the Air Force. Ida mostly raised their two children alone, she said, while her husband was on long deployments.

Now empty nesters, the couple moved to Virginia Beach from the Midwest last year to start a new chapter in their lives, spend more time together and get healthier, including taking walks on the beach.

Ida tears up every time she reads the letter. The writer confesses his deep love and admiration for his spouse.

“To the most beautiful being that the earth could be blessed with,” he wrote. “The stars in the sky are jealous of you because you are the brightest.”

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He describes how his soul is intertwined with his wife’s.

“I will do anything for you. My beautiful wife … love is never lost as long as I have you,” he wrote.

Ida said it brings back the feelings she had when her husband was deployed.

“I felt the other half of me was missing,” she said. “Love that strong for a person does exist.”

The Billingsleys hope to find Jordan and Marquise some day and give them back the bottle.

“We’ll be keeping it safe until then,” Shawn said.

Stacy Parker, 757-222-5125, stacy.parker@pilotonline.com