I’m no hobbitt.
My five-year-old Damon has just informed me about his love for cupcakes, despite the fact that "cupcakes ah also fahts, daddy."
Heh, I'd forgotten that. I'ma get ‘im with that one later...
Father-in-law, Poppy, is a smallish, wiry, thin, deceptively strong old man, but he occasionally requires a bit more muscle when working any number of his odd jobs, and he invites me along. Cash in my hand is a sweet incentive, the work isn't meant to kill me, and he's damn easy to be around.
So we built a fence. A big one.
Fairly-newly-richened lady Sandra likes to scream at her kids and husband and hire out Poppy for any old chore around their rather stately joint. The money's good and he puts up with it, but she has absolutely zero right to have such a well-adjusted and pleasant 14-year old daughter. I figured, or at least had hoped, that she was hanging around me and Poppy because of her raging teenage hormones, but it turns out that she genuinely and sincerely possesses a strong work-ethic and nothing but the purest of intentions for wanting to subject herself to such conditions (both the weather and my sweatystinky self).
So we hammered and sawed and I dug somewhere between 23 and eleventy brazillian holes a half meter deep and put really heavy posts and really heavy bags of concrete in them.
It was good, but hard, but good.
Somewhere along in there, my wedding ring disappeared. To keep it from getting all scratched up, I'd tied it to the string around my neck using my bestest Boy Scout knot, yet forgot not only that I'm a complete tardigan, but that I got thrown out of the Scouts before I got that badge. A brief moment of carelessness and stupidity, for which I am known for many, basically wrecked me.
I had help in my search for it, I had a basic idea of where it might have been, but it wasn't getting found. I traced and re-re-re-traced all my steps, as did my help, and we found not a clue. We knocked off early as I was apparently so perilously close to breaking down that Poppy didn't trust me to carry the 40-kilo posts without repeatedly banging one against my head.
I wasn't having fun. Wife wasn't having fun either, and we were both quite down. It wasn't the money, it wasn't the hassle, it was just that thing that you couldn't hope to explain to any dude who's never been happily married.
The next day, we rented a metal detector, I figured out how to use it, and I spent two solid hours going over every spot I could think of, including checking each two-foot concrete posthole. I don't know what I would've done had the sensor sounded above one of the now-filled-in holes, but I had a hammer, a chisel, a song, and I wasn't to be stopped.
My heart leapt when I actually found a ring instead of a bottlecap or fencing staples, but I just as quickly threw it into the next time zone when I found it to be a crappy old "mood ring" from some crappy vending machine.
I was still not having fun. Neither was wife. Neither of us wanted to say it out loud, but we were both left thinking, "But this stuff just doesn't happen to us! It just doesn't." We made some wishes and went to bed. Wife held her finger up, I blew the eyelash off of it, and she reminded me that you can't chase down wishes, you have to just let them come to you. That night, we dreamt of losing things like mythical animals bound for The Ark (anybody ever heard of a "tanto?") and about clues to finding our Heart's Desire left in broken Spanish (I told her it meant "Golden Estuary" though it could've just as easily been "Burnt Cookie Dough.").
I worked my ass off the next day, with what appeared to be a firm resolve to a "job well done," but instead what was in fact a need to get finished and get out of there. The work wasn't near as exhausting as walking around with constant radar on, finely tuned and highly sensitive, and I was growing sick of the futility of it all.
We finished the fence and hung the wrought-iron gate, and the assemblage went into the house to sort out the cash and such. I stayed behind to take one last walk, casting cursory looks to my left and right and occasionally down, but certainly not seeing anything for I was not really looking. For some inexplicable reason, I thought that it was somehow going to reveal itself to me.
My walk finished, there was no more fence to traverse. I was done.
I walked to the front of the driveway, pulled the dropbars up, and proudly swung the wide gates inward. I was enjoying a comfortable sense of accomplishment while staring at the gate when I simply had to turn my head and look down. Though I don't know why, I stared directly into a spot that I would never have seen from any other angle and had previously been searched thoroughly.
And there it was.
There in a crack in the concrete, an inch and a half wide, four inches deep, and about nine inches long, sat my ring. The light that did hit it wasn't significant enough to make it glint or shine and I had to stare for a few seconds before I could even make out it was there. I had no right looking in that exact spot with such intensity, though even if I had I wouldn't have picked anything up with my previous radar's strength.
I lost it two days previous, spent a combined 10 man-hours searching for it over a 500 square meter area, and within 10 minutes of finishing up the job, had found it in a place so obscure and simple it boggles.
I don't know why I found it, but I'm not asking too many questions.
It's back and I'm whole again.
