🍾📜 The story of a missing message

Twenty-six years ago, Makenzie Van Eyk, 9, dropped a message in a bottle into Lake St. Clair as part of a school assignment. 

As the years went by, she never thought anything of it. Until – Makenzie received a recent call from her children’s school (her alma mater) asking her to come in immediately.

• “I was really worried that something happened with my kids,” she told the Washington Post of the initial phone call. Makenzie’s daughter, Scarlet, 9, and son, Huxley, 6, both attend St. John the Baptist Catholic Elementary School in Belle River, Ontario.

Head fake: So Makenzie was understandably shocked when the school secretary told her that her message in a bottle had been found more than two and a half decades later. A kindergarten student found the bottle washed up on the shore, not far from where Makenzie had released it all those years ago.

The timing of the finding felt surreal, as Makenzie’s daughter is currently a fourth grader at the same school she had attended in the '90s. The student who found the bottle is also a student at the same elementary school.

The letter, which was typed up in a new state-of-the-art computer lab (at the time), contained a simple message about the Great Lakes, along with some of Makenzie’s personal info. Upon finding the letter, the school also reached out to her teacher, Roland St. Pierre, who had retired years prior.

😌 Full circle: Makenzie and her fourth-grade teacher met on the beach where the bottle was found to reminisce about her young school days.

Makenzie, who is an educator herself, said the story highlights the lifelong connections students make with their teachers. Per WaPo: “I think it goes back to the power of education ... and just the energy that you put into teaching and how it comes back around.”