It was an ordinary day in 2004 when Mary Grams, working in her family’s garden on their farm in Alberta, Canada, lost her engagement ring. She had been pulling weeds, just like she did many times before, when she noticed that the ring, which she had worn since 1951, was no longer on her finger.
The discovery shook her to the core. This ring wasn’t just any ring—it was the symbol of her love for her husband, Norman. The two had been married for over 50 years, and the ring had been a part of her life since the year before their wedding. “I went to the garden for something, and I saw this long weed.
For some reason, I picked it up, and it must have caught on something and pulled [the ring] off,” Mary recalled, thinking back to that moment. She had tried everything to find it. “We looked high and low on our hands and knees. We couldn’t find it. I thought for sure either it… or something happened to it,” she said with a heavy heart.
Mary didn’t tell Norman about the loss. She didn’t want to hurt his feelings. Instead, she secretly bought a new ring that looked almost identical to the one she had lost. “I didn’t tell him, even, because I thought for sure he’d give me heck or something,” Mary admitted later in an interview. She wanted to protect him from the disappointment she felt.
Years passed, and Mary and her family eventually moved from the farm to a new place in Camrose. But they kept the old farm, along with the garden where the ring had been lost, near Armena. The garden had been in the family for over 105 years, and though they had moved away, it still held a special place in Mary’s heart.
Then, in 2017, nearly 13 years after the ring had vanished, Mary’s daughter-in-law, Colleen Daley, was in the garden pulling carrots. As she dug up one large carrot, something strange caught her eye. Wrapped around the carrot’s root was a sparkling diamond ring. Colleen was shocked.
“I knew it had to belong to either Grandma or my mother-in-law because no other women have lived on that farm,” Colleen said. She asked her husband if he recognized the ring. When he saw it, his face lit up. “Yeah,” he said. “His mother had lost her engagement ring years ago in the garden and never found it again. And it turned up on this carrot.”
Colleen couldn’t believe it. The ring had somehow been hidden in the soil all those years, and now, as if by magic, it had been unearthed by a carrot growing in the very spot where Mary had lost it. “If you look at it, it grew perfectly around the ring. It was pretty weird looking,” Colleen said, still in awe of the strange sight.
Mary was thrilled to have her ring back after all those years. She slipped it back on her finger without hesitation. “I’m going to wear it because it still fits,” she said with a smile, as if nothing had changed.
Sadly, Norman had passed away over five years earlier, just after they celebrated their 60th wedding anniversary. But for Mary, the return of her ring was a bittersweet moment. It was like a piece of her life with Norman had come back to her, bringing memories of their many happy years together.
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