Dad had a folder he wanted to show me while I was there. I’d never seen it before.

Carefully preserved, pristine inside the plastic, were sheets of lined paper with carefully near-perfect handwriting. Just ever so slightly faded from age.

Words had to come right to where they lined up at the right, which meant that there were hyphens announcing ‘to be continued’ plunked into the strangest places within those words. But the penmanship!

It was a five (or was it six?) page report on Thanksgiving by a third grader one hundred years ago that her parents had clearly been proud of and had kept.

The budding author was my grandmother.

And on the cover of that report was a drawing of a turkey.

I did a serious double take–I thought at first Dad had saved an old drawing of mine and why was he showing me that in the context of this and it totally threw me a moment. But no, it was his mother’s.

My grandmother the avid knitter, who ran the county chapter that knitted for the troops during The War in hopes that somehow that would bring her three sons home safely and sooner. (They all made it back, though one was deafened by the sounds of the warfare the ship he’d captained in the Pacific had gone through.)

I loved to draw as a kid and I can still pick out something I drew any time I see it all these years later. The inside covers of the books that belonged to me all had to be so adorned, with enthusiasm that sometimes spilled onto other pages, too.

To be charitable, you could at least figure out what the thing was supposed to be, and judged against some of my peers I really wasn’t too bad a doodler. But there was no great talent there.

My little sister on the other hand is a gifted artist–truly, go see for yourself. Yeah. Me? Only with yarn. I have forever been in awe of what Anne can do.

But I am absolutely gobsmacked that as a kid I drew exactly like another third grader whom I knew as the sweet elderly grandmother I only got to see a few times in my life before she was gone. The proportions, the angles, picking up the pencil here and moving it there, that careful control that thickened the line while trying to make a perfect half circle at the top of the head. Even the wattle was my turkey wattle.

Twins. In childhood and, with a nod yarnward, adulthood. Sixty-one years apart.