The Wedding Ring

This story takes place in 1964 when I was three years old in my hometown of Newnan, Ga. It happened in the early part of the summer. Although I was too young to remember the event, I know it to be the truth, for my grandmother told it to me in later years, then it was confirmed by my mother and grandfather...

One morning, after finishing up her housework, my grandmother was hanging a load of freshly washed clothes on the clothesline in her backyard. After hanging the last garment, she picked up the clothes basket and headed back towards the house. Suddenly, she felt a very cold chill start from her left shoulder and travel down the length of her left arm, then out the ends of her fingers. She looked down to see if something was crawling on her and noticed her wedding ring, which she never took off, was gone from her finger. She searched the area around the clothesline and the path she'd taken to and from the house. It was nowhere to be found. She went inside and searched the entire house for the ring. Nowhere.

When my grandfather got home from work that evening, my grandmother was crying. She told him what'd happened and, together, they searched again. The ring was just gone. Several days passed with my grandmother searching each day and crying at her failure to locate the ring. The following Saturday morning, my grandfather asked her if she wanted to go fishing. She agreed, for this was my grandparents' favorite past time. They gathered up their cane poles and fish bait and headed down to the old mill pond for some fishing. After about an hour, my grandmother, having no luck, propped her cane pole on a forked tree branch that she'd spiked into the ground for just such a purpose, and started over to where my grandfather was fishing about thirty feet away. She caught the gleam of something out of the corner of her eye and to her right and looked in that direction. All but blinded by the gleaming object, she went over to where it lay on the ground in a patch of grass, and bent down for a closer look. There on the ground lay a ring identical to her wedding ring. Somewhat startled and shaken, she gasped and called "Bill!" (my grandfather's name), "Come over here!" Noting the urgency in my grandmother's voice, my grandfather went over to where she was and looked down at the cause of the urgency in my grandmother's voice. He picked it up. "It looks just like yours!" he said. "Yes it does" said my grandmother. Chilled to her very soul, she took the ring from my grandfather's hand and studied it. There was something which looked strangely like biscuit dough caked all around the setting in the ring. My grandmother gasped, for she remembered making biscuits with the ring on the night before it'd gone missing and had forgotten to clean the ring before going to bed that night. She knew..somehow, she knew the ring was her very own though she was afraid to even consider how it'd gotten there. She slipped the ring on the third finger of her left hand. It fit her, as she'd known it would, just as it had fit her for the past thirty years since the day my grandfather had given it to her when they'd gotten married....caked biscuit dough. A perfect fit.

Coincidence? I don't believe so...In closing, I would like to say that everything in this story is the truth. One thing though, that I would like to mention, though it may have no bearing on the event. The old mill pond was located a quarter to a mile from my grandparents' home on the old mill village. There were a couple of drownings there. Only one was an accident, a little boy who'd wandered away from home and fallen in. The other one was a suicide, A young woman, known to my grandparents, who'd been abandoned at the alter, drowned herself there, never having received the wedding ring she so strongly desired. Why the spirit of this brokenhearted young woman, if indeed it'd been her, had chosen to take my grandmother's wedding ring, no one knows, though as I said, it may have no bearing at all on the loss and recovery of my grandmother's ring. If it had indeed been this particular spirit that'd taken it, perhaps in seeing my grandmother's grief over the loss of the ring, the spirit found compassion, therefore leaving the ring on the bank of the old mill pond where my grandmother would find it while fishing that Saturday morning..... Thank you for reading. I hope you enjoyed the story....