A steady stream of letters arrived in Heidi Hogan's mailbox from the same woman two or three times a week.

The two women had lost touch for 10 years, but once they reconnected, the notes rolled in for 23 years, as reliable as the sunrise.

The writer found Hogan at a low moment. She had just lost her mother-in-law, to whom she had been very close.

Ten years earlier, when she was 22, Hogan was in a car accident with her young family. Her husband, 23, and their daughter, 14 months, died in the accident. She and her son, 3, survived. Her mother-in-law had remained a connection to all she had lost, and was more like a mother to her than her own mom. The loss hit her hard.

And that's when her godmother found her again.

Lenore Anderson had been a church secretary in Milwaukee when she met Hogan's parents. Anderson's own parents had died when she was young and she had no immediate family to speak of. Hogan's parents took her under their wing. She frequently joined their family for dinner after church. They asked her to be Hogan's godmother when she was born.

Soon after, Anderson moved away to earn her bachelor's degree, ending up at St. Louis' Washington University, where she earned her master's in social work in 1961. While Hogan grew up in Wisconsin, her godmother worked in crisis intervention in the roughest parts of St. Louis. Anderson visited the Hogans about once a year.

Anderson never married, nor had children herself. But when she met a child or any person she liked, she bonded strongly with them. Her goddaughter was certainly in that circle. Years after the accident, Hogan remarried, had two more children and adopted a child with special needs. Anderson visited the kids, sent them gifts and wrote their mother the weekly letters.

She worked as a social worker in the St. Louis area for more than 50 years, and when my husband hired her more than a decade ago, she developed an affection for our children. Every Easter, Halloween and Christmas, packages would arrive for both of them from her.

We were hardly alone as recipients of her generosity.

If she was at a garage sale or in the senior center and spotted something one of her clients or "adopted" children would like, she bought it and sent it. One of the children she counseled early in her career, when he was 10 years old, stayed in her life for more than 40 years. When she had to move from her home in the city to an assisted living center, he took the bus across town to her home to help her pack and move.

As she got older, the osteoarthritis in her back got so bad that she hunched over and pushed the seat of her walker, instead of the handles, to get around. But she continued to work and was devoted to her clients. She would find out which candies the youngest ones liked and keep their favorites on hand.

It was always a mystery to me why a woman so vivacious, with such a generous soul, beautiful through and through, never married or had a family of her own. When I asked Hogan if she knew why Anderson never had children, she said: I'm going to assume I was hers.

Perhaps Anderson figured out that loving people didn't require anything more than a giving heart.

"She saw the world as her oyster, and it presented pearls to her in the form of other people," said Pat Way, Anderson's longtime friend. When Way saw her in a hospital bed, in septic shock from an infection the day before she died, the first thing her friend said was, "You better call Betty and tell her I may not be in tomorrow." She was worried about seeing her clients the next day.

Hogan said she cried for 24 hours after she learned of Anderson's death on Jan. 2. She thought of her father, whom she had adored and who died when she was 15, meeting Anderson in heaven.

"I imagined him thanking her for taking care of me."

At home, there's an unfinished letter Hogan had been writing to her godmother that never got mailed.

When Mary Jane Turrubiartes' youngest child dragged her to the gym near the end of 2012, it was the last place she wanted to be.

Her daughter Elida, now 21, knew her mom was unhappy. Turrubiartes was nearing 200 pounds, pushing a size 18 and taking four medications for high blood pressure, along with steroid medicine for asthma. She was prediabetic and her cholesterol was high.

Her self-esteem was even worse than her health.

"She was always so negative about herself," Elida said. She said she didn't want her mother to die because of health problems related to her weight.

Turrubiartes, now 48, knew her marriage of 20 years had been bad for a long time. She struggled with emotional demons she wasn't ready to confront.

But she listened to her daughter and went with her to the gym in the suburbs of Houston where she met a personal trainer -- my brother.

She sat in his office with her daughter and listened to him say she could change her life.

"I'm too old," she said. "I'm too fat." Her daughter and her new trainer refused to accept that.

So, like so many others with the same intention near the start of a new year, Turrubiartes signed up to begin training. It was pretty miserable at first. And it didn't get much better for a while. After a particularly difficult workout, when she felt discouraged and wondered whether she should continue training, her trainer said to her: You need to look in a mirror and figure out what is going on with you.

"Who does he think he is?" she thought to herself. She wanted to quit.

She talked to her mom, who encouraged her to stick with it. Elida told her to keep going, too. They were proud of her effort.

She had been through a lot of hardship, even before this particular journey began.

Back in 2000, Turrubiartes had nearly lost her own life when she was 36 weeks pregnant. Doctors induced her to give birth because of preeclampsia, a condition in pregnancy when women develop high blood pressure. Her baby was born with the umbilical cord wrapped around his neck.

He died in the hospital two weeks after he was born.

"I just got numb after that," she said. "I went into this place in my head where I was on autopilot. I didn't grieve. I went back to work right away."

Years later, the weight started really adding up. She was the one who cooked for her entire family. She loved to bake for them, too.

"I was eating everything I was cooking and baking," she said. "I was so unhappy, I don't think I even knew it."

At the gym, 13 years later, she was dealing with those emotions while transforming her body.

After changing her diet and about six months of training three days a week, the pounds started falling off pretty quickly.

Her doctors were amazed at her progress, and she slowly got off nearly all her medication. The hardest decision she made was realizing she had to move on from a marriage that had only been getting worse.

"I gave everything to my husband and kids. I thought we were going to grow old together. I'm not 30. It's kind of scary being alone," she said.

She filed for a divorce that should be finalized in a few months.

"There were days when I was so down in the dumps, I didn't want to go anywhere," Turrubiartes said, let alone a gym. But she forced herself. The things she was able to do while training gave her courage. It made her stronger physically and mentally.

She lost more than 50 pounds over the course of that year. She's now down to a size 8. She decided to study for her certification to become a trainer while she continued to work. She passed the test in October, and wants to train other women and help them regain their confidence.

Her daughter had seen how unhappy she was with herself, even when she couldn't face it.

"If it wasn't for her, I probably would never have done it," said Turrubiartes.

Elida said her mom may not realize it, but her dedication to making her life better has encouraged her just as much.

The transformation in her life has been bittersweet.

"It's sad because the family is broken up," she said, crying. "But I'm at a better place physically, mentally and emotionally."

Her daughter had helped her realize: I can't be unhappy like this anymore. And she's starting to see herself differently.

"If someone tells me I'm pretty, I'll say, 'No, I'm not,' she said. "My girls will say, 'Mom, learn to take a compliment.'"

Sometimes when she gets dressed and passes by a mirror, she does a double-take and backs up to take another look.

"Oh, OK," she'll think to herself.

"I'm learning how to take a compliment."

Araceli Robles, 43, recalls a life-changing pact she made with her six brothers and sisters as a young child. They swore to always be best friends and live in the same city.

Not every child in her family remembers that specific deal. But Robles is the eldest of the seven, and as the eldest of six, I tend to trust first-born accounts.

Regardless of whether the pact was formal or just an understood consensus, the bonds they formed as children did end up changing the direction of several lives.

The Garcia children grew up in DeKalb, Illinois, a rural town in the northern part of the state. Their parents had emigrated from Mexico and left their own families behind.

"We grew up very broke," said Ivan Garcia, 41. "My mom and dad were incredibly hard workers. We were each others' best friends growing up because we didn't have a lot of activities outside the home."

For a while, three of the four brothers shared a single bed together, as did two of the sisters.

Their tight family bond was a product of choice and of circumstance, he explained. When you don't have much money or extended family nearby, and when you're one of only two Mexican families in town, your brothers and sisters are your constant playmates. Ivan was ready to leave it all behind when he attended Southern Illinois University Carbondale for graduate school. He and his fiancee headed to St. Louis in 1998 to attend chiropractic school. They changed their minds at the last minute, got jobs and started investing in real estate.

And that's when the great migration began. Ivan invited his brother Berto, who had been traveling while working for General Electric, to join them in St. Louis. Berto quit his job and moved into their back porch, which lacked air conditioning and heat, and spent the winter there. He slept on a mattress with their two dogs for warmth. He quickly landed work and began investing in real estate, as well.

When Ivan and his fiancee, Jenifer, got married in 1999, his younger brother, Johnny, met the bride's younger sister, Amelia, at the wedding. Johnny decided St. Louis might be the place for him, as well. (He and Amelia later got married.)

Johnny and older brother Miguel had been especially close growing up, so Miguel decided he could do his work as an IT consultant and Web developer remotely -- from St. Louis.

"Truth be told, we were having a good time, and no one wanted to be left out," Johnny said.

By then, they had decided to merge their real estate pursuits and create a family business, Garcia Properties.

Araceli followed a decade ago with her husband and children, and it was just a matter of time before they lured their parents and remaining sisters from Illinois. They persuaded Anna, a registered nurse in DeKalb, to join the company as a real estate agent.

"As a nurse, I saw many people alone when they were sick or at the end of their life. I made a note of that and thought, 'I want to be together. I want to live close,'" Anna said. Plus, she wanted to be able to see her nieces and nephews whenever any of them wanted to.

The youngest, Aileen, moved shortly before her parents did.

Today, most of the siblings live within a city block of one another. Six of them work together. They gather weekly for Sunday dinner at their parents' house and for a constant stream of birthdays, baptisms and confirmations.

For so many college-educated adult children to have relocated to a new city, largely drawn by familial ties, is unusual.

Economics professor Robert Pollak, of the Olin Business School at Washington University, co-authored a paper on a 2009 study looking at how often adult children live near their mothers. Adult children with college degrees are much less likely to live with or near their mothers, the study found. Among couples who both have college degrees, about half live more than 30 miles from both of their mothers and only 18 percent live within 30 miles of both mothers. But among couples who have no college degree, the situation is reversed. A college degree increases the chance of mobility and career opportunities away from one's hometown.

Moving was a daunting prospect for the Garcia parents after laying down roots for so long. "We had the comfort of the city where we called home for 30 years, we had all of our friends, our church community, and all the memories we had of our children growing up, but what we didn't have was our actual children," their mother said. A close friend of theirs asked why they were moving to the city.

"That is where our children are," she said. There was a moment of silence, and the friend responded, "You are truly blessed to have all your children in one city. My children are all over the country, coast to coast, and I won't live to see the day with my children all under the same roof again."

That conversation made the move easier.

"It made things clear for us," she said.