Every family has one story that sounds like it should begin, “You won’t believe this, but...”
Here’s mine.
Around 1960, when I was four years old, we lived at 2 Reeves Road in Woodbury, New Jersey. My father was the type who found peace in a Saturday spent stabbing the earth with a trowel. Somewhere in the course of planting shrubs in the backyard, he lost his wedding ring.
Not misplaced. Not “it’s around here somewhere.”
Gone.
The search began immediately. Soil was sifted. Fingers raked through dirt. The obvious places were checked, then checked again. Nothing. Vanished. Swallowed by the earth.
Eventually my parents did what everyone does when confronted with an object that has apparently entered another dimension.
They gave up.
Three years later we moved about a mile away to a new house at 4 Saint Regis Drive. Life went on. The missing ring became one of those family stories that occasionally resurfaced over dinner before sinking back beneath the conversation.
Then, eleven years after it disappeared, my father was once again in the back yard with a shovel in his hand.
One of the shrubs had died.
As he dug it out, something glinted in the dirt.
His wedding ring.
The same ring.
The same ring he had lost...a mile away and more than a decade earlier.
If I stopped the story right here, we’d have a riddle. Or a solid campfire mystery story: wedding rings with a homing instinct, some cosmic prank, the Gardening Gods flexing. Feel free to enjoy that version for a second.
Now here’s the real one, which is somehow even better.
The shrub my father was removing was one he had transplanted from our old house when we moved in 1963.
Back in 1960, mid-planting, the ring had slipped off his finger and disappeared. Straight into the root ball. It spent the next three years quietly waiting to hitch a ride to its new address, then another eight years waiting patiently underground until the shrub finally gave up the ghost.
Eleven years after it vanished, the ring emerged.
Turns out it was never lost.
It just moved when we did.
Houses come and go, but apparently some things move with us, whether we know it or not. If your next change of address involves Connecticut, I spend my less-hopscotching hours helping people buy and sell homes along the Connecticut Shoreline and throughout Greater New Haven.
If you’d like to explore Connecticut from a different perspective:
🏡 Connecticut Weekend Homes
📖 Connecticut Baedeker
💡 David Mayhew’s Real Estate Knowledge Base
🌲 Buy Your Second Home First
Still hopscotching...
David
The family had become one of the chosen at Woodbury Friends...