The Ring Finders Blog | Page 889 of 1087

My hunting partner and fellow ringfinder, Gregg Larabel, received a call from Cindy S. saying she lost her ring in her bedroom and they could not find it.  Gregg and I showed up at her house after she got off work and met her husband, Paul, and Liz the family dog, then received the story of the lost ring.  Cindy and Paul were just waking up on Saturday morning and Cindy took off her three rings to apply hand lotion and handed them to Paul to put on his pinky finger for safe keeping.  He laid the rings on the bed for a moment before he decided that wasn’t a good idea, and handed them back to Cindy to put on the night stand.   Cindy took the rings without really looking at them and put them on the night stand.  She realized the wedding band was missing when she went to put them back on.   They searched the bedroom for hours without finding the lost wedding ring, and, deciding it was unlikely the cat ate it, Cindy got on the internet and found TheRingFinders.com.   Gregg and I decided to start the search in the bedroom, and with the help of Paul and Cindy we dismantled the bed and searched everywhere in, around, and under the bed.  No luck.  I then started to look next to the dresser at the foot of the bed and after moving a small pillow on the floor and with the help of a flashlight I saw the glint of the white gold ring hiding in the pile of the carpet.   How the ring got way over to that side of the room is the real mystery but we were all happy to see it back on Cindy’s finger.

This lost-and-now-found wedding band will go down in my book of smiles as ‘The Valentine’s Ring.’

I say this because, the ring’s owner, Todd, became engaged to Suzie on a very happy Valentine’s Day in 2010. Subsequently, exactly seven years later, on Valentine’s Day, 2017, Todd’s love-token emerged from the icy darkness of a Wisconsin snow pile. It was as though the ring was most anxious to celebrate the warmth and glow of the occasion all over again. But I’m getting ahead of my story.

Two months earlier, the ring vanished from Todd’s finger as he was clearing the snow off his car. Together the couple shoveled a wide area around their vehicle. They even set the shoveled snow to one side and sifted through it by hand. It was a race to find it before the inevitable snowplow arrived.

Questions ricocheted in their minds. Had the ring fallen off their vehicle as they drove away? Had a passerby picked it up? Or had the snowplow already done its nasty deed? Or was the ring already cocooned inside the ten to twelve foot high mound of snow at the end of the parking lot? These unanswered questions only served to deepen the sick feeling in Todd and Suzie’s stomachs, the kind that accompanies the loss of something personal—precious.

Having found my name on The Ring Finders website, Todd reached out to me a few days later. Would I be willing to search for his ring? The cold was especially brutal that evening as I applied my 40-plus years of metal detecting experience to the task at hand. But it was to no avail. The only remaining hope was that maybe, just maybe the ring was somewhere in the gigantic snow pile. If so, it would have to wait until spring thaw.

In the weeks to follow I kept an eye on similar snow mounds where I live. As they slowly melted I returned at intervals to check the one where Todd’s ring had been lost. But as I climbed over the pile with my detector, all was quiet in my headset, ominously quiet. “Ring,” I asked out loud, “where are you hiding?”

The morning sun shone warm and promising on Valentine’s Day. I noticed a trickle of water leaking out from beneath a snow pile not far from my house and knew it was time to take another drive. As I pulled my vehicle up to the now-much-smaller mound, a pair of Canada geese stood guard. They took turns honking their displeasure at my disturbing their morning solace.

Keeping a wary eye on the unpredictable duo, I traced my way around the retreating perimeter scanning for any sign of a wedding band. Then a glimmer caught my eye! And now, as Paul Harvey, American radio broadcaster for ABC Radio Networks used to say, “You know the rest of the story.”

Suzie stopped by to pick up Todd’s ring just a few hours ago. As it turns out, Todd was traveling on Valentine’s Day. And so Suzie is looking forward to surprising him with a most-special Valentine’s gift—-again!

A couple of months ago Sam K. called me and said he was putting lotion on his hands and placed his wedding ring on his lap while sitting in his carpet cleaning truck. He forgot about the ring and got out of the truck and went about his business of cleaning carpets. There was a heavy snow that day and the snow plow plowed the snow in the driveway, of the house he was at, into a large pile. My detecting partner Dave Boyer and myself searched through the snow and then knock down the snow bank to detect it deeper, no results. I called Sam and told him we would go back out after the heavy snow melted down a little. After several trips over a couple months we still couldn’t find the ring (we never quit). Last week Sams wife, Caitlin, called me and asked if Sam told me about the other house he was at that day and could have lost it there. I got the address from her and yesterday went out to Grandville, Michigan on a beautiful sunny day (44 degrees) and after 5 minutes I found the ring in a little snow bank at the end of the driveway. I called Caitlin and told her the good news. Seeing that Valentines Day is upon us, she decided to put the ring in a box of chocolates. The rest is history and the ring is back on his finger.

The pictures tell the story of Sam receiving his ring on Valentines Day from his wife. the first picture is Sam looking in a box of chocolates, the second is him seeing his ring and the third is Sam with his recovered ring. HAPPY VALENTINES DAY!