Lost It

I was having such a good day too; a picnic at church to celebrate its 70th anniversary, made some pork belly burnt ends for a barbecue on Tuesday, got the eavestroughs cleaned out, and the nephew even stopped by for dinner. Afterwards, my cousin Parker called for a chat, and while he was on the line, Glory video chatted Audrey from Churchill with Fenya and Bobby in the room.

I jumped on after my call was done and we were having a nice catch-up when I looked at my hand and noticed my wedding band was missing.

I immediately tried to think about where I might have taken it off, but it is very, very rare I do that. Both my wedding ring and my claddagh on the other hand have been too snug for me to bother with taking them off unless I am doing something very messy, like mixing a meatloaf or something.

But I have lost a few pounds over the last year, and the rings have been looser...and my gloved hand got snagged on a piece of metal on the eavestrough this afternoon, prompting a momentary, monkey-trap panic reaction, but I don't think my glove ever came off at that point.

They were going on and coming off all afternoon though, and with any removal my ring might have gone with it.

I excused myself from the call, checked the gloves with no luck, put on my rainjacket and got the stepladder from the garage. Propping it up underneath the eavestrough, I imagined a scenario where, while furiously trying to extricate my hand from the metal snag, perhaps I did my glove off for a moment to check for bleeding - and if I did, the ring could be just sitting there in the silt at the bottom of the trough.

But it wasn't.

That had been a forlorn hope from the get-go though; the rain after supper could've washed it away and down the spout, depositing it either in the rain barrel (not very likely) or the pipe going to the weeping tile (far more probable).

And that is if it even came off while I was up the ladder.

I swept the front yard with my worklamp, and the garden under the eavestrough. Then the rest of the lawn and the area around the rain barrel. When the lamp ran out of juice and I dropped it in the house, Audrey suggested it could have ended up in the bucket of detritus from the eaves, which would necessitate a search of the green food scraps bucket that all of our yard waste goes into.

After throwing on my chemical gloves and pawing through the topmost layers of the bin, I saw no sign of it, but recognized the possibility it could have sank to the bottom. We will have to throw the contents onto a tarp and sift over them a bit. I suppoe there is always a chance, but at this point I am treating the ring as lost, and any potential recovery as an undeserved miracle.

I am tremendously upset with myself - not so much for the ring coming off, but for the fact that it was missing for hours before I noticed its absence. Just one more sign of the ADHD symptomology I discuss with Fenya from time to time.

At the end of the day, I know the ring is a thing, and I should be a little embarassed for telling Audrey that I would rather have lost the finger than the ring that was on it.

But it is also a symbol, and represents the best thing my wife ever gave me besides our daughters. I haven't misplaced it for more than a minute in our three decades of married life, and to have lost it so quickly is not just frustrtating, it is maddening and disappointing in ways I cannot even articulate.

So I am afraid I am going to go on being upset about this for a while.