I did not find anything cool at the thrift shop but instead I picked up an item outside a house for sale with Free sign on it. It was a sewing machine which I thought would be perfect to mend my clothes. I did not have the time to check to see if it was in working condition or a piece of trash, but some day I would figure it out. So I put it in a corner of our small apartment.

I have heard that when we expect that somebody else’s junk is a treasure for someone else, it needs lot of patience for met to believe. Usually I do not believe in that saying and I am less concerned about getting it for free or even buying “junk”. We were new in a country and we had zero knowledge of this kind of technology of a fancy machine. So I asked my husband to see if he could help me feed the needle with thread. He said, “Throw it back outside, I do not have time.” I was not that interested either at that time. However, when I was inspecting it one more time I found a small pouch sticking inside the tool box. Wait a minute, what? See, somebody forgot her ring in this box.

I showed it to all the people at work. Nobody had time to listen to my story of finding a treasure and they all told me it was just an artificial ring. And I believed them. It did not lose it’s shine in the next 12 years and I used it many times with that same belief, that it was only an artificial piece of jewelry.

Then one day, I decided to check with local jeweler, oh my God! She asked me about paper work, about price, etc. I said I did not have any. Then she checked it with things that she had. She priced it at $8000 dollars!!

I could not sleep that night thinking about that precious ring. Somebody threw it in the trash along with the machine. I do not know where these people went after they sold their house. It was too late to find the owner. God sends gifts through things we would never think of or expect. My husband who is a ‘saint’ told me he could find all the previous owners of that house from the municipality records. It has been almost a year and he could not contact anybody.