- Makenzie Van Eyk threw the letter into Lake Saint Clair 26 years ago
- Now, it has miraculously ended up in her daughter’s classroom.
- The bottle was found by a child and given to the school.
A woman is reunited with a message in a bottle she dropped into a lake 26 years ago, after it ended up in the hands of her own daughter’s teacher.
As part of a fourth-grade class assignment, Ontario native Makenzie Van Eyk wrote a letter about the water cycle, put it in a glass bottle, and threw it into Lake Saint Clair.
She never thought about it again, until 26 years later, when her daughter came home and told her that she had miraculously ended up in her classroom.
The bottle was found by a boy named River Vandenberg, who was playing at Lake Saint Clair with his grandmother Michele Vandenberg and noticed it.
In the letter, Makenzie had included the name of her school, St. John the Baptist, where River was also a student, so after Michele and River read it, they decided to take her there to try to reunite her with the writer. .
As part of a fourth-grade class assignment, Ontario native Makenzie Van Eyk wrote a letter about the water cycle, put it in a glass bottle, and threw it into Lake Saint Clair.
“There was no date on the letter, so I thought maybe (it was from) this year or last year at most,” Michele said. CBC recently.
“We sent it to school, then (River’s) teacher contacted us that day and said it was from 1998. I was shocked.”
A teacher at school thought it was interesting and decided to read the note aloud to his class, and coincidentally, Makenzie’s own daughter, Scarlet, was in the class.
“I was completely speechless,” the young woman recalled in the publication upon learning that it was written by her mother. “Everyone was saying, ‘Who is this? Who is it?” And I said, “My mother.”
Scarlet took it home and showed it to Makenzie, who was equally surprised.
“I definitely didn’t think about it often, so I was really surprised,” he said.
‘I remember writing it. (The teacher) had us seal the bottles with wax, and that process really stuck with me.
‘It was just when our school had its first computer lab, so it was one of the first things I printed on paper. That was great.’
He never thought about it again, until 26 years later, when his daughter came home and told him that he had miraculously ended up in her classroom (archive image)
The letter says: ‘I learned in school that water has to go through cycles to remove bad things, like germs and many other things.
‘Water has been here since God created the world. Isn’t it funny to think that you could be drinking the same water as Jesus?
The outlet reported that it was found “almost exactly where Makenzie threw it.”
‘He didn’t travel very far. Maybe he got stuck in the reeds,’ he concluded.
