September 15, 2024
A wonderful day at a nature center turned into a stressful night for Carolyn. While helping her children through the Nature Trail and before leaving the center one of her cherished pearl earrings came dislodged from her ear, however the earring back did not. Thinking of how to find the earring, Carolyn went to a hardware store that rents a metal detector. Luckily the store person knew a bit about the detector they rent and would not rent it to Carolyn. The reason was it just was not sophisticated enough to detect such a small piece of metal especially in an environment that would have many metal objects in the area i.e. pull tabs, nails, pieces of fencing etc. An effort was put forth and proved the rental cost would not be justified by the known detector’s results.
Another suggestion by the employee was to contact “TheRingFinder”, in this case. me. The sun would have set by the time I could have been on site. So an 8AM meeting was set. Carolyn and a few others returned to the event area before the sun set and frantic looking all over the parking lot and areas that could be seen before the sun set, but did not find the pearl.
In the morning I, along with Carolyn, started by first looking through the car’s seats, floor, voids between the center console and seats, cup holders to mention the obvious. Nothing was found and a quick walk over the parking area and on down to the kids nature trail. This was straight forward from the place the loss was discovered going back along the path of the previous day’s activities. Even with my adjustments made to my detector of choice for this search, the search was hampered by the many bits and pieces of metal in the area I had to search over. I stopped to do a bit of control tweaking because I was now on wood chips and not gravel and I wanted to have the best setup to find the earring.
Up to this point I was following Carolyn pretty closely, and she got about 10 feet ahead, looking down and at her foot was the earring. The was the end of my searching the area. Carolyn said if it had not been for the store emplyee’s honesty as to the rental detector’s capabilities, my logical thinking and implementation of a methodical search “we” would not have found the earring. We both agreed it was “Meant To Be”.
With a happy Book of Smiles photo, pair of earrings, need to get back to her children, the hugs, Thanks, Best Wishes, and a weekend to remember ended is short order as we parted to go on with each of our own day’s agenda.