"How cute in their matching cowboy shirts!" exclaims a bobbed-haired, short skirted woman strolling past the family sprawled on two waterside blankets in the warmth of the midday sun.
"Thank you kindly," nods Ellen over the roar of the falls, smiling at the recognition of her western-wear handiwork and hoping that's the end of the conversation disrupting her rare Sunday siesta.
"Fraternal or identical?" smirks the disheveled man stumbling along the grassy swale beside the young woman and splashing something from a bag as he turns to look down.
That's the infuriating question fielded by parents of twins with any public appearance. Barring two separate water breakages, most don't know the answer since monozygotic twins don't always look exactly alike and dizygotic ones sometimes do.
It's the height of both Prohibition and flapper culture in the spring of 1922, but the two-year-old twins are more concerned about the interaction with their lifelong companion. They'd napped on sisters laps the whole ride up Mount Summit in their father's new International Harvester bus. Awakened on the jarring dirt track down to the river, the boys were raring to go when their family disembarked beside the falls.
"I'm not rightly sure, but that happy one came first," Ellen concedes, lunging as Francis toddles toward the swift current with his brother Frank right behind.
Teen sisters Ethel and Alice, their awe at the flapper broken by the boys, scramble after them.
"Surely you gotta know," the red-faced man sniggers as he takes another slug.
"Listen here mister," Orville hisses, jumping to his feet and spraying into the drunken man's face. "They look alike so they might be identical. They're brothers so they're definitely fraternal."
"That's a good one, Ace," the drunk slurs, passing Orville the bag.
The offering is just enough to appease Orville's temper as he takes a sip of the moonshine.
"Not bad! Where'd you get this stuff?"
"Between you and me, there's nothing from Pittsburgh to Cumberland so this one came from her papaw's."
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