My great grandparents became engaged in the summer of 1924. Due to some political issues at home, my great grandmother decided they were better off immigrating from England in the hopes of beginning their new lives as a married couple. After careful consideration, they narrowed their choices down to either South Africa or Canada. It proved to be a hard decision to make, but ultimately, they chose the latter option. Finally, they married in 1929 and set sail for Canada. They ended up settling in Toronto shortly before the Stock Market crashed and the Great Depression began, incapacitating the industrialized world's economic capacity.
Their first decade of residing in Canada proved to be the most challenging years of their lives. By the time my grandmother was born in January of 1939, my great grandparents resided in a three-bedroom house with a local fire fighter and his teenage son, who sadly struggled with serious mental health issues. During one immensely sunny afternoon in June, my great grandmother stood within the kitchen and began washing dishes. She absentmindedly placed her engagement ring on the counter beside her before starting the task. The ring consisted of a beautiful golden band with three minuscule white diamonds arranged in a horizontal pattern. After my great grandmother's passing in September of 1999, my grandmother inherited her ring and still has it in her possession.
My great grandmother soon finished the dishes and walked away, forgetting her ring. Within the hour, she became greatly alarmed upon realizing her mistake. She then proceeded to frantically search the house for the ring, but there was no sign of it. Feeling incredibly distressed, she decided to turn to the paranormal for assistance. She sought guidance from a renowned psychic in town and decided to meet her in person. After becoming acquainted, the psychic informed her that the ring would undoubtedly be found. The psychic then claimed to have envisioned both the ring and a small handkerchief. She concluded the reading by telling her the ring would be recovered by a man with a clearly noticeable disability and then promptly returned.
Later that week, my great grandfather sat comfortably in the living room reading his morning newspaper. He suddenly became thunderstruck upon coming across a picture of his wife's engagement ring in the missing items section. My great grandmother immediately confirmed it was hers and she called the number of the one who recovered the ring. The one who answered the phone sounded like a middle-aged man who agreed to drive to their house and deliver it personally. He arrived at the house within an hour or so. After kindly introducing himself, my great grandmother noticed that the man walked with a severe limp. Exactly as the psychic predicted. He then proceeded to explain how he came by the ring.
He mentioned that he lived at the far end of the street and during a casual walk through the neighbourhood, he stopped abruptly because he noticed a glittering object on the ground through his peripheral vision. He examined the object and discovered it was a diamond ring. It lay within the tracks of one of the city's many street cars.
The one question my great grandmother pondered was how the ring ended up on the street to begin with. She eventually discovered that the fire fighter's son had a lapse in judgment and took her ring, quite possibly because he liked it. She never suspected that he took it with malicious intentions. She merely figured that he was too sick to know any better. She ultimately surmised that he had stuffed the ring into his back pocket along with a silk handkerchief he was carrying. Because he was stricken with a cold, he would habitually remove the handkerchief to blow his nose into it. The only plausible explanation was that once he passed the location where the middle-aged man found the ring, he had accidentally removed the ring from his pocket while fishing for the handkerchief. He then promptly dropped the ring, walked away and forgot about it. These circumstances were indeed mysterious, and I am thankful that even after many years, my grandmother has managed to retain this crucial amount of information.
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