As a construction crew took cabinets down in the Home Ec Cottage, they found a small locket with a photograph of two kids. It didn’t take long for the locket to be returned to its original owner last week, as Joyce Ruward, executive administrative assistant for Park 1, believed it belonged to Linda Greaham, a former home ec teacher in Powell.

“I had Mrs. Greaham as a teacher, and I felt I recognized the kids as hers,” Ruward said.

Ruward sent a picture of the locket to Linda’s son, Jeff Greaham, who is a teacher at Westside Elementary School, asking if the kids in the photo looked familiar.

“He said indeed it was him and his sister [Julie],” Ruward said.

Jeff Greaham picked up the locket and brought it to his mom last week, handing her an envelope.

“He said, ‘I have something for you,’ and so I opened it, and by George, that’s what it was,” Linda Greaham said Friday. “It was really a surprise.”

Jeff was in the seventh grade and Julie was a fourth grader when the picture was taken.

While she recognized the photograph immediately, Linda Greaham isn’t sure when she lost the locket, but guesses it was sometime in the early 1980s. The locket is on a small keychain, but didn’t have any keys with it.

At the time she lost it, “I probably just wondered what happened to it [and] looked for it and didn’t find it,” she said. “I hadn’t thought about it for many, many years.”

Greaham started teaching home ec in 1977, and continued until her retirement in 2006.

She’s surprised the locket survived; many people passed through the building over the decades, and it was renovated for different uses in recent years.

“The picture is not damaged or anything,” Greaham said.

She’s also thankful the construction crew set the locket aside and gave it to the school district.

“I’m really surprised that they didn’t just throw it away,” she said. “When they’re remodeling things, there’s junk that’s laying around and just gets tossed.”

Greaham has fond memories of her time in the Home Ec Cottage.

“I was thinking the other day when he brought that [locket], that I spent nearly half of my adult life in that building,” she said.

Greaham also remembers the cottage as a student, as she attended home ec classes there during her junior high and high school years.

“When I was in school, that was a fairly new building,” she said.

The cottage was built in 1952, and Greaham graduated from Powell High School in 1963.

She is thankful to live in a small town like Powell, where a missing keepsake can find its way home within a matter of days.

“The longer I live here, the more lucky I think we are,” Greaham said. “I’m so happy I don’t live somewhere else.”