It’s Not the Last Place You Look

There’s a snarky old saying that you always seem to find a lost item in the last place you look. Unless you’re me.

Last spring I was doing work in my yard. Whenever I am using yard tools with long wooden handles, I inevitably get blisters. The worst ones are on either side on my wedding ring where it contacts the handle.

I routinely take my ring off and set it aside in a place that I am sure to see it. This spring I was in the habit of putting the ring on the padded seat of my recumbent bike.

After finishing my yard tasks on May 13, I took my recumbent for a relaxing 30-mile bike ride to DC. Back home, I was hanging out before my shower when I realized that my wedding ring was not on my finger. Hmmm.

Uh oh. It was on the seat of the recumbent. I went out and looked everywhere. On the seat. In the space between the seat pad and the seat back. All over the floor of the shed. In the lawn across which I rode the bike to get to the street. No ring.

For the next six months, every single time I walked into my back yard I looked down on the ground, thinking that maybe the ring fell off the seat when I left the house that day. No ring.

I overturned landscaping bricks. I emptied the shed. I raked the lawn using a metal rake. No ring.

My finger felt strange. When I went to turn the ring around my finger as I had the habit of doing, the ring wasn’t there.

My sister and brother-in-law came to visit in early July. My brother-in-law told me how he lost his wedding ring while raking leaves in his yard. He rented a metal detector and actually found his ring in a humongous pile of leaves.

I kept looking then decided after a few more weeks I rented a metal detector. I detected this way and that way. I found screws and nails and odd metal siding hardware. I found metallic rocks. No ring.

At that point I figured it had fallen off the seat of my bike during that bike ride to DC. I gave up looking.

A couple of days ago, I was walking away from the backyard shed when I happened to look down and… damn. There, embedded in top of the soil in a bare spot in the grass, was my ring. I had walked over it at least 300 times. It had been rained on, raked, mowed, and ridden over repeatedly in the past seven months yet there it was. I guess it had fallen off the seat after all.

Now it’s back where it belongs.