In 2004, a woman named Mary Grams was working in her family’s garden on their farm in Alberta, Canada. She was pulling weeds, something she had done many times before, when she suddenly noticed that her beloved engagement ring had disappeared from her finger.
“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 later recalled about the day she lost the ring. She searched for days, combing through the dirt and the grass, hoping to find the small, precious piece of jewelry. But despite all her efforts, the ring was gone. She believed it was lost forever.
Mary had worn that ring since 1951, when her husband Norman had given it to her before they got married. It was a symbol of their love, and the thought of losing it was devastating. “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,” Mary said, recalling the day she lost it.
To spare her husband’s feelings, Mary didn’t tell him that the ring was missing. She didn’t want to upset him. Instead, she secretly bought a similar-looking ring, hoping that Norman wouldn’t notice. “I didn’t tell him, even, because I thought for sure he’d give me heck or something,” Mary admitted to CBC Canada years later.
Life went on, and though the memory of the lost ring lingered in her mind, Mary and her family moved on too. They relocated to Camrose but continued to care for the garden on their old farm near Armena, which had been in the family for more than 105 years.
Then, in 2017, something extraordinary happened. Mary’s daughter-in-law, Colleen Daley, was working in the same garden, pulling up vegetables. She noticed a strange-looking carrot, its shape a little odd, and decided to pull it from the ground. As she did, something caught her eye. Wrapped around the carrot’s long, orange root was a sparkling diamond ring—Mary’s lost engagement ring!
Colleen was stunned. “I knew it had to belong to either Grandma or my mother-in-law because no other women have lived on that farm,” Colleen told reporters. She asked her husband if he recognized the ring, and to her surprise, he did. “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 said, shaking her head in amazement.
Mary’s ring had somehow been hidden in the soil for nearly 13 years, and the carrot had grown around it, almost as if it were meant to be found. “If you look at it, it grew perfectly around the ring. It was pretty weird looking,” Colleen said, still in awe.
When Mary saw the ring again, she couldn’t believe it. “I’ve never seen anything like that. It was quite interesting,” she said. And though it had been so long, she was overjoyed to finally have her ring back. She immediately slipped it back onto her finger, where it belonged. “I’m going to wear it because it still fits,” Mary said, smiling.
Sadly, her husband Norman had passed away a few years earlier, just after the couple celebrated their 60th wedding anniversary. But for Mary, the return of the ring brought back precious memories of their life together, a final connection to the man she loved.
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