A Reunion that no one will believe! by Julie Eagles © 2009
On the 19th December 1959 Bruce and I became engaged, and I became the proud owner of a three diamond engagement ring, which I have worn constantly from that day onwards, a period of 47 years.
Towards the beginning of this year, 2006, and because I had lost a considerable amount of weight, this ring, and several others I own, all became too loose to wear safely. As a consequence, in July I took the rings to a jeweller to have resized. I was told my engagement ring’s shank was far too thin to be altered and needed replacing. I agreed to this and felt happy with the work done, but I did question the fact that maybe the claws also needed attention, but was told they were “okay”. I only had the ring back a week or so when disaster occurred.
As a member of the North Shore Caravan Club committee, I volunteered to bake a fruit cake for an elderly member who was about to achieve his 300th rally with the club. It has taken him 35 years to attain this goal, so it became something special for the club to celebrate with him and a very busy weekend was arranged in his honour.
The morning I decided to make the fruit cake arrived, and as the recipe dictated, I rubbed the butter into the flour with my fingertips, until it was like coarse breadcrumbs. I then went to rinse my hands under the tap, only to find the centre stone of my engagement ring missing. Naturally I was devastated, and proceeded to sieve the flour and butter thoroughly, but the diamond was nowhere in sight. I hadn’t even been outside that morning, so I knew it had to be inside the house somewhere. Convinced that it had gone down the plug hole, I continued on to make the cake, but my heart was not in the job at hand. Baked, it was then frozen until last week when I removed it from the freezer and iced and decorated it.
We went to no end of trouble to look for the diamond, Bruce disconnecting the plumbing under the sink, I endeavoured to convince two of my small grandsons with the lure of a few dollars to crawl around the carpet and have a good look, (they soon lost interest) and we also emptied the vacuum cleaner bag onto newspaper, sorting through it carefully. At one stage our eyes lit up, because we thought we had found it, but it was only a sequin that the children had been playing with, mixed in with the vacuum cleaner dust.
On Saturday morning, 7th October, the big cake cutting occasion duly arrived. Before it was cut, I mentioned to everyone what had occurred, and although sympathetic, there were gales of laughter. I requested that they all chew carefully, and that if I saw anyone with a glint in their teeth, like a current TV ad, then I would know who had found it. There were 40 people at the morning tea and half of the cake was consumed, but no diamond eventuated. To be honest, I didn’t give it a lot of thought at that time, and happily munched my own piece without thinking about it really. A quarter of the cake was given to the guest of honour to take home, and the rest was cut up yesterday morning for morning tea before everyone left for home.
I was sitting with a friend Jenni, who when she took a piece, mentioned that she was going to have the biggest piece on the plate. We laughed, when suddenly she went very quiet and exclaimed “I think I have found your diamond”. With that she delicately removed this little brown object from her mouth. Once it was cleaned on a tissue, incredibly it seemed, this little brown blob sparkled…. Yes, it was definitely my diamond.
Now, you may not believe this story, but I assure you it is true, and my reunion with my diamond is something I will never forget. An unbelievable story really. Now of course, I have this tiny diamond selotaped to a piece of paper, and I don’t really know what to do with it. We had the diamond replaced soon after it was lost, and it turned out to be a very expensive exercise by the time all the claws were repaired as well – which should have been done by the jeweller in the first place. Had that happened at the time, the diamond would not have fallen out.
The old saying of “looking for a needle in a haystack” can be likened to this story I guess, and when I told my daughters that it had been found, initially they thought that I was having them on and took a lot of convincing before they would believe that it had actually occurred.
-oOOo-
