Mary knew the ring had slipped off somewhere while she was gardening at her home in Alberta, Canada, but despite looking for days and even weeks, the ring was nowhere to be found, according to Global News.
“Hands and knees I was digging. I thought, ‘Surely I can find it,” Mary, now 84 years old, says in the article. Since her original ring set from the 1950s had broken, this replacement ring was an expensive replacement and Mary was not keen on the idea of telling her husband about the mishap.
“I cried for days,” Mary admits.
Instead of owning up to the incident, Mary went out and bought another ring in the hopes that her husband wouldn’t notice the marked difference in size and colour.
Thankfully, it seems Mary’s replacement ring did the trick; for her husband never questioned it once in the eight years before his passing. The couple had been married for 60 years.
She’d long-since given up on the ring when her daughter-in-law made a miraculous discovery.
“My wife was digging carrots for supper, and I guess she came up with a carrot that had something on it,” Brian Grams, Mary’s son, says.
The carrot was cinched in the middle, looking like a finger with its circulation cut off, and Brian’s wife had been about to toss the mangled vegetable when she saw the reason for its deformity: it had grown inside Mary’s missing ring.
By the time the ring was found, Mary no longer lived at the family farm. When her granddaughter visited with the ring (still in good condition, and still attached to the carrot), she recognised it immediately.
“A sort of happy feeling went through [me],” Mary says, on being reunited with the treasured possession.
After snapping the carrot and washing the ring off, it was time for the moment of truth. And the band still fit perfectly on Mary’s ring finger, where it was always meant to be. She’s not taking any chances now.
“I should’ve put it in a safe place in the first place, but I didn’t,” she says. “Anything I do outside, I’m going to take it off and it’s going to stay.”
This article first published on Starts at 60.
