When she heard her son’s voice on the phone it seemed so distant. Even though she heard his words, she couldn’t help but believe something was wrong. His words made her feel like she was traveling through time, 13 years into the past to be exact, when she lost something that she cherished more than anything. Now, as she nears the end of her life, she was hearing this amazing news. And the story she was listening to about how it happened was nothing short of miraculous.
Mary Grams has lived a long life and she felt like nothing could take her by surprise. Mary is an 84-year-old widow that lives in Camrose, southeast of Edmonton, Canada. She lives a quiet, ordinary life. Mary lost her husband in 2012, but she still gets to spend time with her children and grandchildren. Recently, Mary was able to be reunited with something she thought she lost with her youth. It only took 13 years to make its way back to her.
Mary and her husband spent many years together on their family farm in Armena, Alberta. Armena is a small village located in a remote part of the province. The community thrives off of its agriculture and Mary’s family was no different. Their farm had been in their family for 105 years, and they did everything they could to keep up the farm and the garden. Unfortunately, while Mary was working in the garden one day, something horrible happened.
While Mary was walking in her garden one day in 2004, she noticed that there were a large amount of weeds on one side. She was concerned that the weeds would violate her other crops, so she started pulling them. Even though she didn’t have gloves to wear, Mary didn’t mind. She pulled out all of the weeds, completed her work, then went inside to finish the other chores. It wasn’t until hours later that Mary noticed something shocking.
Mary had lost something she had for 50 years. The engagement ring Norman gave to her when he proposed in 1951. She thought about where she could have lost it, realizing that it probably got stuck on a weed in the garden and fallen off. She immediately ran outside to look for it. “I got on my hands and knees and looked all over and I could not find it,” Mary explained. Mary cried herself to sleep, but she refused to give up the search.
Over the next few days Mary went back to garden, hoping to find her ring. But the ring was nowhere to be found. Mary soon realized that she would never find the ring, but there was no way she could tell Norman. “I didn’t tell him, even, because I thought for sure he’d give me heck or something,” she said. She did tell her son Brian, though. She also made the proper steps to make sure no one else would ever find out.
Mary decided to go to the jeweler to buy the cheapest engagement ring that he had. Norman, along with everyone else, never realized the truth. Only her and her son, Brian, were privy to the information, and they were able to keep it a secret for 13 long years. Until one day when a discovery brought it all back up again. The story was so unbelievable that news outlets all across Canada picked it up.
The year was 2017 and Mary no longer lived on the farm in Armena, but the family was still taking care of the garden and the farm. One day, Brian’s wife, Colleen, was harvesting vegetables in the garden to have for dinner. As she was picking some carrots, she noticed a small, misshapen one. At first, she was going to feed it to the dog, but she decided not to and put it into the pail. She made the right decision.
Colleen then went inside and began washing the carrots. There she saw the unusual carrot again. As she looked closer, she realized why the carrot looked so strange. Something was tightly wrapped around it! “All of a sudden there was this sparkling thing around it and about two inches down it had cut into the carrot,” recalls Brian. As soon as she realized what it was, Colleen immediately went to show her husband.
Wrapped around the carrot was a diamond ring! It looked like the carrot just grew right through the ring, leaving the ring tightly wrapped around the carrot. As soon as Brian saw the ring that Colleen had he immediately recognized it. “His mother had lost her engagement ring years ago in the garden and never found it again. And it turned up on this carrot,” said Colleen. Colleen and Brian knew they had to call Mary, but they weren’t sure how she was going to react.
Colleen recalled the conversation with Mary the day they found the missing jewelry. “I said we found your ring in the garden. She couldn’t believe it.” The news was the best thing she’d heard in a long time. “You have a kind of a happy feeling. I don’t know how to really describe it, but you don’t expect that after so many years,” said Mary. She was more than excited to see the ring again.
Colleen and Brian’s daughter were asked to bring the ring to her grandmother’s house in Camrose. The moment Mary saw it she was overwhelmed with emotion. “I recognized it right away,” she said. Mary carefully picked up the ring to bring it to the sink to wash of the dirt with some soap and water. She couldn’t wait to have the ring back on her finger after so long, but she was a little hesitant. Would the ring even fit her?
With anticipation flowing through her body, Mary began to slide the ring onto her finger. She had the feeling that she would need to bring it in to the jeweler to get it resized. Luckily, the ring slid right on her finger. Mary immediately took of the replacement ring that she had been wearing and put the right ring back where it belonged. “I’m going to wear it because it still fits,” she said. Her family still couldn’t believe what was going on.
“Mom had lost her ring several years ago and for some reason, a carrot happened to germinate right through the ring and it grew around it,” Brian said. It was hard for him to believe it was really happening. “It was so weird that the carrot grew perfectly through that ring,” added Colleen. It seems that rings have their way of finding their way back to where they belong. Not too far from them, a similar thing happened in a town called Saskatchewan.
Somewhere around 45 years ago, another farmer named Bill Wilson was driving down the road when he had to swat a bug out of the window of his car. He soon realized that he flung his wedding ring out the window with it. He spent decade searching for that ring. Sometimes he even used a metal detector, but he had absolutely no luck. Many years later in 2017, his neighbor was walking down the road and found the ring. She told her grandmother, who later told Bill about it. “It’s a little worse for wear,” he said, but at least he has it back.