Suzanne Flament-Smith dropped her daughter off at a high school volleyball practice in Florida and went for a walk while she waited for the team to get ready.

She chose Bayshore Boulevard for her walk. The street runs along the water in Safety Harbor, about five miles outside of Tampa, Florida. Normally a picturesque spot, it was littered with debris brought ashore by Hurricane Debby. Discarded cans, old sunscreen and waterlogged slime lay in piles.

Flament-Smith began filling garbage bags and then noticed something odd: an old-fashioned and weathered, but transparent and corked bottle in the middle of the garbage.

She leaned forward and looked through the glass.

Oh wow, she thought, I think I have found something special!

She had. It was a handwritten message in a bottle with the letterhead “United States Navy, Amphibious Training Base, Little Creek, Virginia.” The date on the letter: “April 3, 1945.”

But Flament-Smith didn’t open the bottle right away. She waited, picked up her daughter, drove home so her husband could visit, and FaceTimed her son at Furman University before pulling the cork.

“Surprisingly, there was no smell,” she recalled in an interview.

Inside the bottle, the piece of paper was folded into three pieces. There were three other objects next to it.

There was an empty cartridge case with no identification marking or engraved caliber.

A round chunk of metal the size of a gumball rolled around on the floor.

And a thin piece of wood, similar to a coffee stirrer, leaned against the neck of the bottle.

Flament-Smith and her family tried to get the letter out of the bottle using the piece of wood, gave up, broke the bottle and were shocked to read the letter and see the date: March 1945.

In photos, it looks as if the letter was written with a fountain pen. Fading writing, uneven scribbles and a few spelling mistakes make it difficult to read in places.

But it started with “Dear Lee”,

“Got your letter yesterday and was glad to hear from you. So you were a little tipsy the other day. Well, that’s common around here, they have a bar and they have pretty good beer.”

“Bud,” the soldier writes. Schlitz, perhaps. And “old fiful, Pale Ail.”

“I enjoy every night I spend at the base.”

The base – now called Little Creek – was new, built in the early 1940s on the south shore of the Chesapeake Bay as a training ground for amphibious vehicles and assault tactics. Sailors, soldiers and Marines trained there, several hundred thousand according to the Navy, and some of them landed in Normandy.

The letter writer explains that he is now “in radio school” before asking his friend about a liaison and then: “Who is your dream woman now?”

“Well, Lee,” he continues, “I have to go to school now, but I’ll write to you again tomorrow and tell you how I got on in Norfolk tonight.”

He explains: “Boy, I have a little red-haired boy, she’s fine.”

He concludes with the words: “Your buddy, …”

The signature is difficult to recognize.

“Jim” maybe.

Whether the letter was circulated for almost 80 years or was put in the bottle long after it was written, the message reveals: some topics of conversation between old friends are eternal.