Ring Around Your Finger

When spouse and I had been married about a year he got a phone call.

No, perhaps this story is best told another way.

When spouse was in high school, he got a class ring. He wore this ring that was always just a touch too big just about everywhere. He developed the habit of slipping it off and on his finger, like a nervous tick. And one day, the fall after he graduated, at a football game about 20 miles from home, he realized he'd lost it. Where? When? He didn't know. He only knew it was gone.

When spouse and I had been married about a year, he got a phone call.

A young man told him "I found your class ring. I called around and talked to your niece, and she gave me your number." Well, our niece was a student at the local high school, from which spouse had graduated, and it seemed reasonable. Heck, her family had just moved and it wasn't unreasonable that it had been lost in their garage and relost in their move. It just made sense. A kid finds a ring, he asks the girl he knows with the same last name, and she tells him whom to call.

But no. He doesn't know her. He was simply calling people with that last name. He doesn't live in this town. He lives in a town 8 miles south of here. He says he found it at a football game.

This seems reasonable. His school was playing spouse's school and he was looking around and found it, right? No. His school was playing a school some 20 miles from here and he was messing around beneath the stands and found it.

Spouse graduated from high school in 1984. It was 2004 when our phone rang. The ring had laid beneath the stands for 20 years at a school which neither party attended for 20 years.

Irony- that was my high school's football field, and for the record, my school whomped BOTH of their schools.

Last spring spouse was working on clearing the fence row at the cemetery one crisp and cool May afternoon. When we got home, he realized he had lost his wedding ring. He and Mongoosine quickly hopped back in the van and drove, 20 miles, back to the cemetery, and spent an hour searching for it in the rain.

Today, at the same cemetery, clearing twigs and branches, guess what was glinting between the dry blades of grass...