It was 2004 when Mary Grams, a woman who had spent years working on her family’s farm in Alberta, Canada, lost something priceless. As she was pulling weeds in the garden, she noticed that her engagement ring was no longer on her finger. It was gone.
Mary’s heart sank. She had been wearing that ring for 53 years—since 1951, the year before she married her husband, Norman. It was more than just a piece of jewelry; it was a symbol of their long, loving marriage. She searched the garden high and low for days, looking through the dirt and the grass, hoping to find it.
“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 explained years later.
Despite her best efforts, the ring never turned up. “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 recalled, still disappointed that she couldn’t recover the treasure.
Mary didn’t tell Norman about the loss at the time. She didn’t want to upset him, so instead, she bought a new ring that looked similar to the lost one. She hoped that Norman wouldn’t notice the difference. “I didn’t tell him, even, because I thought for sure he’d give me heck or something,” Mary confessed to CBC Canada years later. She wanted to keep the peace, but deep down, the missing ring weighed on her.
Time passed, and Mary and her family eventually moved away from their farm to a new place in Camrose. But they kept the garden at their old farm near Armena, a place that had been in their family for over 105 years.
Then, in 2017, almost 13 years after the ring was lost, something amazing happened. Mary’s daughter-in-law, Colleen Daley, was in the garden one day, pulling up carrots. As she yanked one out of the soil, something unusual caught her eye. Wrapped tightly around the large orange root was… a diamond ring!
“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 showed her husband the ring, and to their astonishment, he recognized it immediately. “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, still in disbelief.
Looking closely, they saw that the ring had grown perfectly around the carrot. “If you look at it, it grew perfectly around the ring. It was pretty weird looking,” Colleen added. It was like something out of a storybook—a lost treasure buried in the earth for years, only to be discovered again in the most unexpected way.
Mary was overjoyed when she heard the news. She couldn’t believe it was really her ring. When she saw it again, it brought back so many memories of the days she spent with Norman. “I’ve never seen anything like that. It was quite interesting,” Mary said, marveling at how the carrot had grown around the ring.
Now that she had it back, Mary made sure to wear her engagement ring again, proudly placing it back on her finger. “I’m going to wear it because it still fits,” she said, smiling as she slipped it back where it belonged.
Sadly, Norman had passed away more than five years earlier, shortly after they celebrated their 60th wedding anniversary. But for Mary, the return of her ring was like a final, beautiful connection to the man she had loved for so long. It was a reminder of their life together, and it brought her a sense of peace and joy she thought she had lost forever.
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