The postcard Scott McMurry got in the mail at his Vienna home earlier this month defines the term "special delivery."

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That's because the postcard from his mother was sent more than half a century ago. The final line of the note, "We will probably be back before this arrives," is the ironic cherry on top.

McMurry's postcard dates back to 1957, the year when his mother Isabel and her husband took a trip to Chicago. She put a two-cent Thomas Jefferson stamp on the postcard to Scott, then a teenager, and sent it home to Decatur, Ga. to commemorate their trip to the Shedd Aquarium.

Somehow, though, the lost postcard surfaced in Daytona Beach, Fla. in early April. From there, the card's recipients tracked Scot down in Northern Virginia to reunite him with the mail he was supposed to get decades ago from his mother, who passed away in 1991.

McMurry, a retired historian, sees the long-forgotten card as a long-lost treasure, one he's happy finally got delivered.

As for the Post Office, they haven't offered an explanation for the 55-year delay of delivery, but in the end, the axiom held true: neither rain, nor sleet, nor snow, nor five decades kept this letter from getting where it was supposed to go.