On the surface, everything seemed ordinary about the annual birthday call Verna McAdams made from her Langford home to identical twin sister, Vera Burke, in Saskatchewan on Wednesday.
But the call was extraordinary for two reasons: First, thanks to video-chat service Skype, the sisters were seeing each other for the first time in 16 years. And second, they were wishing one another a happy 100th birthday.
“This really is something, isn’t it Verna,” said Burke, who lives near Saskatoon.
It certainly was a far cry from the first phone the twins had as kids growing up on a Saskatchewan farm. Without a dial, the operator needed to connect each call.
Wednesday’s call centred on Saskatoon’s snowy weather, eating porridge for breakfast and family members.
“What are you going to do for excitement?” Burke asked her sister. Lasagna, it turned out, was on the menu at McAdam’s residence.
As for longevity tips, McAdams said before the call that she had none.
“I have no secret,” she said. “I think I just have to consider myself lucky to still be here at 100.”
The twins can also credit genetics. Vera and Verna Frederiksen were the youngest children in a family of five. Aside from their brother Albert, who died early at 21, their sister Mildred lived to 96 and brother Herbert lived to 85.
For the time, those ages are significant. Life expectancy at birth from 1920 to 1922 — the earliest record available from Statistics Canada — was only 59 for men and 61 for women.
The twins, who were born two hours apart, grew up on a farm just south of Saskatoon, where their American parents moved to become homesteaders. Birthdays were celebrated over a meal, but weren’t extravagant growing up in the Depression era, McAdams said.
As twins, and perhaps as a cost-saving measure, Vera and Verna were often treated as one person.
“Quite often there was only one present and we had to share it,” McAdams said.
They often dressed in similar clothes and their parents gave them similar names because “that’s just what you did then,” she said.
While Vera remained in Saskatchewan and went on to run a small hotel, Verna moved West in 1938, with her husband Jack Braithwaite. They planned to visit Braithwaite’s brother on Vancouver Island, but never left.
Braithwaite got into the trucking business and the couple had two children.
McAdams has outlived both Braithwaite and her second husband, Dave McAdams, as well as both of her children — one died of ovarian cancer and the other of kidney disease, she said.
But she’s planning to celebrate her birthday Saturday in Langford, surrounded by some of her four grandchildren and seven great-grandchildren.
The next week, her retirement home hosts a communal birthday for all of its residents born in April — including a woman down the hall who turns 104.
Burke celebrated in Saskatoon on Wednesday with four generations of the family.
And while the sisters have grown apart over the years, the video call was a welcome step up from her usual birthday call to her sister, who is two hours older.
“I was a little slower getting here. And I’m a little slow in leaving,” McAdams said. “But she’s still here, too.”
