RETURN OF THE WANDERING RINGS
Rings and their owners reunited after years thanks to carrots, babies and a “dodgy-looking curry”
Mary Grams, an 84-year-old widow from Canada, was devastated when she lost her diamond engagement ring while weeding on the family farm in Alberta in 2004. Her husband Norman had given it to her in 1951. Out of embarrassment, she decided not to tell her husband, but let her son into the secret. She went out and bought a slightly cheaper replacement ring, and carried on as if nothing had happened.
The secret was kept for 13 years until 14 August 2017 when her daughter-in-law Colleen Daley, who now lives on the farm where Mrs Grams used to live, dug up some carrots in the garden. While washing a rather lumpy carrot, she discovered it had grown through a ring. Her son instantly guessed the ring’s identity, and called his mother. At first she thought he was having her on. The ring held plenty of sentimental value, particularly as her husband had died five years earlier. BBC News, Eve Standard, Huffington Post, 16 Aug 2017.
In October 2011, a Swedish woman, Lena Paahlsson, found her wedding ring gracing a carrot 16 years after she lost it. She guessed it had fallen into the sink in 1995, and was thrown out with vegetable peelings for compost [ FT287:7]. Children’s author Nancy Bopp contacted her to say she was delighted that her 2002 book The Gardener’s
Gold Ring – which tells a very similar story – had come to life.
And in November 2016, an 82-year-old widower was reunited with his lost wedding ring after it turned up encircling a carrot dug from his garden. His wife had continually reassured him that the ring would turn up one day, but sadly she died six months prior to him finding it, ahead of the couple’s 50th wedding anniversary. The unnamed man lost the ring three years earlier while gardening in his hometown of Bad Münstereifel, Germany. He was in high spirits after finding the ring, joking that you do indeed “reap what you sow”. [AP] 5 Nov; Huffington Post, 8 Nov 2016.
Chris Robb, 49, from St Albans, Hertfordshire, thought he had lost his white gold wedding ring while playing football with friends. He combed the pitch for 45 minutes and used a metal detector to try and locate it. A year later, in July 2017, his wife Annie, 50, spotted a long forgotten frozen takeaway meal. “We’d just sold our house, so I decided to clear out the freezer,” she said. “There was a dodgylooking curry in there, so I got it out. I was going to throw it away but I wanted to defrost it so there was no water in the bin.” As the curry defrosted, she spotted the lost ring emerging. “You are kidding me,” said her astonished husband. “How on earth did it get in the curry?” D.Mail, Sun, 18 July 2017.
David Penner lost his wedding ring during a visit with his wife to Wyckoff’s Tree Farm in White Township, New Jersey. He returned and searched, but the ring was nowhere to be found. About 15 years later, in April 2016, John Wyckoff, a third- generation tree farmer, was riding on the back of a tractor sticking Christmas trees in the ground when he spotted something shiny in the soil. It was the lost wedding band. An early December NJ.com report on the discovery spurred a call from Penner’s sister-in-law, who connected the two men. The reunion was bittersweet for Penner, who lost his wife of 42 years when she died aged 67 three months earlier. [AP] nj.com, ksl.com, 8 Dec 2016.
Ann Westland, 55, of Sunderland, lost her gold wedding ring in 1997 while digging around a tree in her back garden. She borrowed a metal detector from a friend, but the search proved fruitless. Almost 20 years later, in September 2016, her husband Ian spotted the ring among some snowdrop bulbs while he was gardening. “I noticed it on top of the soil, nowhere near where she had lost it,” he said. Northern Echo online, 19 Jan; Sun, 20 Jan 2017.
A couple who feared a wedding ring was lost forever owe their thanks to a baby living 20 miles away. Andy and Steph Freeman, who live on the outskirts of Norwich and married in 2015, had been hunting for the ring for months. Then they saw a community Facebook post from Cloey Jordan, in Wortwell, near Harleston, to whom they had given their old sofa two weeks before. She explained that her six-month-old son Kaleb had dropped his dummy down the back of the sofa and that when she dismantled the furniture to retrieve it she found Mr Freeman’s ring. BBC News, 17 Mar 2017.