Or what happened to them.

But she does know she didn’t lose the most important one of all — the one Joye wrote in 1940.

And she knows that a pen pal you’ve had for, goodness, more than 65 years now, is a story worth telling. A story of friendship that has crossed the years as easily as a telephone crosses time zones and distance and takes her voice to New Zealand and brings Joye’s here on Christmas.

Of course, they call other times, too, when there’s a good reason, and we’ve just passed the first anniversary of one of those good reasons — Hurricane Floyd and the floods that followed, wrecking such devastation on North Carolina.

“When Floyd came last September,” Laura says, “she called, even though it was five in the morning.”

Joye and her husband had heard about the floods on television, “and she called because they were worried.”

Her voice takes on a tinge of awe, amazed that they can feel so close even though, she says, “we’ve never seen each other.”

But Laura realized how unique being pen pals all those years was — even with their long midway gap — when she saw a national story in the paper “about two gals who have been writing since 1955. We’ve been writing to each other since the mid-’30s. It seems like since I was a little girl.”

But not so little. They started writing when she was still reading the Sunshine Club articles in the child’s section of the Charlotte Observer and figures she might have been about 15.

Her memory, if it hasn’t changed with time, is that she was at a friend’s house on a Sunday afternoon.

“And I was spread out on the floor with the Charlotte Observer,” she says, and she saw a letter from a girl in New Zealand who was requesting a pen pal in the United States. “And I answered it. And shortly thereafter I got a letter back from her, and that started a correspondence. We exchanged pictures and letters about our life and what we did.”

Fun letters, full of girl gossip and chitchat about clothes and movies and songs and boyfriends — oh, she didn’t know it then but they were painting word pictures of the times.

Like the letter she got in 1940, little suspecting that it would be the last letter she’d get from Joye for a long time.

“We’re having a simply awful summer this year,” Joye wrote in February, and Laura still laughs at how funny summer in February sounds here, though that’s what it is in New Zealand. “This is supposed to be our hottest month, and here I am sitting and shivering in the office. Thanks for the snaps. The one of Bud isn’t bad. He’s quite nice looking ...”

She was busy getting ready to come out at the Centenary Ball, buying odds and ends, visiting the dressmaker.

“The white material for my evening dress is awfully sweet and I’ m dying to see what it looks like made up. I’m going to wear a little silver lame bolero over it and my bouquet is to have blue flowers and silver ribbon streamers ...

“I’ll tell you all about the ball and how it came off when I write next time. I’m glad you had a good time in Camden. I guess you thought you were IT (as we say), sailing around in the 1940 Packard. They’re swell cars, aren’t they?”

She hadn’t heard the new song, “Careless,” she wrote, “but I guess it’ll get here all in good time.” “Beer Barrel Polka” had, and “The Three Little Fishes” and “Ferdinand, the Bull.”

Another typist, with whom she worked, had promised to lend her “Gone with the Wind,” and she’d seen “Goodbye, Mr. Chips,” at the movies. She wondered why girls in New Zealand had pink cheeks and American girls didn’t and said she’d gotten quite a nice bolero pattern out of a magazine Laura had sent her and was going to wear it with her coming out dress.

And Laura still doesn’t know why that was the last letter — for nearly 40 years.

“We lost touch,” she says. “The war came. Mayn and I got married in 1941, and I raised babies and ... ”

And life happened.

Until one day in 1988 she came across that last letter. Not all the letters from all those years. Just that one. What happened to all the others? Why was this one ...

“It thrilled me,” she says, “so I wrote her.”

But she didn’t know where to mail it. “So I wrote the postmaster in Inglewood, Taranaki, New Zealand.”

And that was enough. It’s a small town, and the post office box has now been used by three generations of Joye’s family. The postmaster knew just where to put the letter, even if Joye is married now and has a different name — Joye Kaye Rogers, married to Mike, and Laura Simmons is Laura Newman, married to Maynard.

And suddenly they were writing again, as though they’d never stopped.

“We’ve written a whole lot since then.”

And called.

One night the phone rang at 3 in the morning, and in no time they figured out that it was 8 o’clock on Friday night there and Friday hadn’t even arrived yet in Salisbury.

Fascinating.

So were their accents.

“Joye,” she told her pen pal during one of the first calls, “I thought you’d sound like Crocodile Dundee.”

“Well, Laura,” Joye shot back, “I thought you’d sound Southern.”

She is Southern, but a special brand of Southern. Laura’s from Charleston.

“She didn’t know there was a difference.”

And neither of them knew they’d discover they’re so much like each other.

“I used to paint pictures,” Laura says, “and she paints china. She sent me a pretty plate with a lovely picture of a bunch of roses, and I sent her a picture of a blue hummingbird getting nectar from a yellow jasmine bloom. But painting came on in later life for both of us.

“And she had a dog, a black French poodle, and we had dogs for years. She likes flowers and I like flowers. She likes the garden, and I have a little 2-by-4 garden. And we both like birds.”

It doesn’t matter that they stopped writing — “I guess we were flitting around too much then” —and started again. It doesn’t matter that they may have set a pen pal longevity record, or maybe they haven’t.

What matters is “we’re more than pen pals,” Laura says. After all these years, “we’re like family now.”