A Mirror-Across-Time

First Grade, Then and Now (2016)

In 2016, my son was in first grade. That was the same grade I was in when I went to Fallsvale.

He is an avid little artist, always drawing. It is one of the ways he slows down and makes sense of the world. Around that time, I was rummaging through a box my mom saved, filled with old scrapbooks and momentos. Tucked inside was a drawing I made when I was in Mrs. Hahn’s class at Fallsvale.

I had not thought about that drawing in years.

A few weeks later, we took a weekend trip up to Forest Falls. I brought the drawing with me. Standing there, with the old schoolhouse nearby, I pulled it out and showed it to him. I told him I drew it when I was his age, sitting in a classroom not far from where we were standing.

He studied it carefully.

Then he looked up at me and said, “You did a good job.”

That was it. No big conversation. Just a quiet exchange between a father and a son, first graders separated by time, standing in the same place.

It struck me how much gets carried forward without us realizing it. A schoolhouse. A classroom. A teacher. A drawing saved by a mother who knew, somehow, that it mattered. And now a child who draws, just like I did, offering the same kind of affirmation we all want at that age.

Fallsvale was part of my beginning. Seeing my son there, holding something I created when I was his age, made that connection feel real. Not as nostalgia, but as continuity.

Some places do that. They quietly hold our stories.