After missing for nearly 50 years, a long-lost engagement ring has shown up in a southern Alberta garden — neatly wrapped around a carrot.For Janet Cockwill, who lives with her husband Robert just south of Arrowwood, Alta., the moment her grandson walked into the house holding the dirt-covered treasure he found in the carrot patch was a moment she won’t be forgetting anytime soon.“I knew right away,” Cockwill told the Western Standard.“[My grandson] knew he had something special... I knew what he had, but I just never thought I’d ever see it again.”.The story began when Janet said yes to Robert’s marriage proposal in 1969.The two were married in 1970 after Robert took an advance from the wheat board and spent half of it on a $425 engagement ring.The ring vanished sometime in the 1970s, not long after Janet and Robert had settled into life on their family farm, 70 km southeast of Calgary.The couple built a new house on the farm after their first child was born in 1975 and moved into it in 1982.But throughout those decades, one piece from their early years remained missing.“We’re not sure where it went,” Robert told Global News.“I thought it fell off the sink and went down into the septic tank.”Houses were built and moved into, gardens were dug up and relocated, and as Janet puts it, “a lot of water went under the bridge” during the years the ring was gone.Robert eventually bought her a new ring, and life moved on.Then, this September, their grandson headed into the garden looking for carrots for supper.Moments later, he sprinted back with a grin and a carrot growing perfectly through the missing ring..“I could hardly believe it,” Janet said, adding that how the ring ended up in the garden in the first place is still a mystery.“Our oldest son thought maybe it had something to do with a burning barrel we used to have, but that wasn’t in the right place,” she said.“One of our grandsons is a bit of a horticulturalist, and he works up the garden with a tractor, and I think it might have been deeper underground, and when he worked it up, it got flipped closer to the surface. That makes sense to me. But how it got there in the first place — I really don’t know.”The discovery has now made the original ring even more meaningful.“We’ve been married 55 years, so [Robert] didn't show me the door when I lost the ring,” Janet joked, saying she plans to keep wearing the rediscovered ring.“I still like it better than the other one. When [my grandson] first showed it to me, it was just as sparkly as the first time I put it on — the diamond part, not the metal. There are three diamonds in it, and they looked just the same.”When asked about whether the grandson who found it is now the favourite, Janet said, “No, I have eight favourite grandchildren.”“I have to be diplomatic,” she joked.She also mentioned that her mother-in-law had once lost her ring shelling peas and found it in a bowl later.“Maybe it runs in the family,” Janet said with a laugh.
