Lawn Mower Ring

This is our garden, about 30×70 feet. I wouldn’t say it was overgrown, but occasionally we come across a Japanese soldier wanting to surrender.

Yesterday Sue decided she was going to cut the grass.

It is exactly a week till our 42nd wedding aniversary.

Whir, whir, whir. Silence. Sue comes in and says she’s lost her wedding ring.

Most people when they cut grass start at the top and work their way down the garden. But Sue sort of starts a quarter of the way down, works outward a bit and then mows a path down to the bottom and mows a bit of a space down there.

In other words she’s covered most of the length of the garden so the ring could be anywhere.

Me, panic? But what do you do? To start with I just walked slowly around the ground she had covered and staring intently at the ground. In the bright sunshine there were plenty of silvery gleams from droplets in the grass any of which could have been a narrow platinum ring. Within ten minutes it was clear it wasn’t in the open.

Sue felt strongly that it had come off in the patch where she started because there had been a lot of messing with extension cables and, having a writers’ imagination, thought it had flown into the deepest grass around the washing line post never to be seen again. I thought it would be pretty futile covering the whole garden on hands and knees and we might have to find a metal detectorist. But I thought I’d have a little scratch with a rake more to get a feel of what it would be like to do an more extensive search than in hope of finding anything. Almost immediately I saw a little gleam in the sunlight. Looked too narrow to be a ring but I gave it a little prod with my finger …

Needless to say I had been scratching around in the opposite direction to Sue’s patch of deep grass because I don’t have her rich imagination.

Call it luck if you will, but I was a Boy Scout.