Carole Lechan scanned the crowd of travelers streaming out of the international arrivals gate at Logan Airport, looking for Jane Anderson, a New Zealand woman she had shared 56 years of her life with, but never met.

When Lechan spotted a woman with short blond hair pulling an orange suitcase, she knew it was Anderson, and the two ran into each other’s arms.

“It’s crazy, isn’t it?’’ Lechan said Wednesday. “Did you ever think we would ever meet? It never occurred to me that we ever would.’’

Anderson held Lechan for a moment, and shook her head in wonderment.

“It’s amazing,’’ she said. “Crikey.’’

Crikey, indeed. Anderson and Lechan have been pen pals since October 1959, when they were 9 years old. But unlike most children whose parents or teachers prodded them to write letters to children overseas, they never stopped corresponding.

For nearly six decades, they have written to each other five or six times a year, forming an enduring bond that began with a single, neatly folded Aerogram sent from one little girl growing up in the Bayside section of Queens, N.Y., to another living on a dairy farm half a world away, in Sefton, New Zealand.

Their friendship is a testament to the close ties that were nurtured in a more patient era — long before FaceTime and instant messages — when waiting for a letter covered in foreign postmarks was a much-anticipated event that culminated in its own special joy.

Through multiple changes of address, the letters that arrived regularly in their mailboxes chronicled their weddings, the birth of their children, the deaths of their parents, and, last year, the arrival of their first grandchildren.

“After 56 years, you feel a connection,’’ said Lechan, 65, an office manager at Temple Israel in Natick. “A lot of our lives have paralleled.’’

The relationship began during the Eisenhower administration, when Lechan’s mother wrote to World Pen Pals, a program at the University of Minnesota that introduced children in the United States to children abroad.

It was an era when pen-pal organizations, like the International Friendship League in Boston, flourished as a way to foster cross-cultural understanding.

But like many pen pal groups, it eventually folded as postal rates increased, school budgets were cut, and the world turned to e-mail and Snapchat.

“It’s the Internet that killed us,’’ said Robert Carroll, a former teacher who ran World Pen Pals out of his home in Saugerties, N.Y., from 1996 until the group shuttered in 2012. “People want instant gratification, and waiting for a letter to come for three to six weeks doesn’t satisfy that.’’

Anderson said she remembers getting Lechan’s first letter when her fourth-grade teacher, Mr. Lintott, was passing out mail from America, and handed her the Aerogram — a single sheet folded into an envelope and sent by air mail — from Carole in New York City.

“That was a novelty,’’ said Anderson, 65, a retired kindergarten teacher who now lives in Nelson, New Zealand, a small city on the Tasmanian Bay. “I hadn’t written to anybody overseas.’’

Several weeks later, Lechan remembers, she found Anderson’s reply in her mailbox in Queens.

“I remember her first letter really well,’’ Lechan said. “The first letter recounted the number of each animal on her farm. I obviously had nothing to match that with, having no animals at all.’’

But the two 9-year-olds soon discovered that, despite the distance between them, their worlds were not entirely unlike. Both had a brother and sister. And both were committed to maintaining an epistolary relationship, first as children, and then as adults with careers and families.

“When someone writes you a letter, you are bound by responsibility and courtesy to respond, so we just kept writing,’’ Lechan said. “And after some number of years, you feel this is amazing, we’ve kept it going, and it wouldn’t be good to stop.’’

Anniversaries, birthdays, and holidays were marked with letters, cards, and photographs.

“I really always enjoyed having someone to write to from another country and, as time goes on, you grow up, and you appreciate it more,’’ Anderson said. “I had always hoped I would meet up with her.’’

Last year, Anderson proposed that she and her husband, Roydon, visit Lechan, following a tour of Europe.

Lechan said she was delighted — and a bit nervous. She and Anderson had corresponded by e-mail in recent years, but had never spoken by phone.

“I was just really surprised she would make this investment to come see me,’’ she said. “But we’re not getting any younger, and this is the time to do it.’’

After arriving at Logan on Wednesday, the Andersons were settling in for a five-day stay at Lechan’s home in Natick.

Lechan said she has bought tickets to “Peter and the Starcatcher’’ at the Lyric Stage Company and has invited her children to meet the Andersons at a barbecue on Saturday. They may also take a trip to the beach. “No big excursions,’’ Lechan said.

Mostly, she said, she is just looking forward to getting to know her pen pal in person.

“I think it’s rather wonderful,’’ Lechan said. “I never thought we would ever meet. We were just too far away.’’

Michael Levenson can be reached at mlevenson@globe.com. Follow him on Twitter @mlevenson.