Yesterday, I lost my mother’s wedding ring. I’ve been wearing it since she died. I kept thinking I’d get tired of it. Or lose it. But I still wear it. I wear two rings and at the gym, I take them both off and put them in my shoes so it’s impossible for me to forget to put them back on.  

Yesterday, as I took the rings out of my shoe, the wedding ring dropped. But it’s a shiny white gold band. It would show up on the floor, right? But I couldn’t find it anywhere. I looked everywhere, even unreasonable places. No one else was there, so no one could have picked it up. I did everything I could think of to find it.

Another woman came into the locker room and, seeing I was upset, nearly in tears, asked if she could help. Together, we checked the entire floor again. When I told her I had looked in my gym bag, she told me to look again. “Take everything out. Do it again, just dump it, dump the whole bag.” Still nothing. Then she said to take my workout clothes out of my bag again and really shake them hard. She grabbed one of my shoes and shook it hard as she was saying this, but nothing came out, so she put it back down. 

Or started to, but I yelled, “Wait!” From my angle, I could see the ring had wedged itself between the side of the shoe and the tongue. 

I really think she was almost as relieved and happy as I was. We hugged and cried a little bit. It was just the wonderful moment of unity.  

I’m not sure what my point is with this story. Maybe I just like to remind people how much good there is in the world. That can be easy to lose track of sometimes.