A Toronto man has taken on a big project during the pandemic. While helping clean out his grandparents' home after his grandfather died, Jason McDowall discovered a little blue suitcase.
Inside was more than 500 love letters exchanged between his grandparents during the Second World War.
"They had exchanged these letters being separated by distance because of the war and I thought this is a really interesting story to give people almost a sense of hope being separated in the time of the pandemic," McDowall said.
He started to transcribe the letters on a blog called Little Blue Suitcase for his family to enjoy, but then people started sharing the link and McDowall was receiving comments from people around the world who were reading it.
McDowall says so far he's transcribed around 110 of the letters. He is reading them for the first time as he transcribes them.
"So I'm taking the journey and discovering things along with all those reading the blog," he said. One day he hopes to turn the letters into a book.
One of the things he's taken away from reading these letters is learning not to take things for granted.
"As I read these letters and a war is raging across the world and they don't even know what's going to happen and so they take in the little pleasures."
