His Dogness

This column first appeared in the January 2013 issue of Forsyth Family

My wedding-ring hand is also my throwing hand. One day, while playing dodge ball with Sparkle Girl and Doobins in the front yard, my wedding ring shot off the end of my finger when I threw the ball. As it happened, I saw the ring fly through the air and land in the grass a foot or so from the rock border that separates the garden from the grass.

Well, that was lucky, I thought. I could have had no idea where it flew. But I know exactly where it is. I took care not to take my eyes off the spot as I told Sparkle Girl and Doobins what had happened and walked over. What I expected to be a straightforward rummage in the grass turned up nothing. Hmmm. A more thorough search that included Sparkle Girl and Doobins proved no more successful. Rats.

The search party soon grew to include Garnet and our next-door neighbor Scotty. The radius of the search grew well beyond the area where it seemed reasonable for the ring to be. I got a rake and raked. Still nothing. Eventually, the search party dispersed. For the next few days, I would periodically go back out and look around for a while. When mowing day came, I pushed more slowly than usual, keeping an eye just in the front of the mower in hopes of spotting the ring glistening in the sun before I ran over it and the ring shot into the sky, landing who-knows-where? I didn’t spot it. Nor did I hear the sound of the blade striking metal.

I ordered the new ring a half-size smaller. As the days passed, I thought about it less and less, although I did wonder from time to time whether it might show up one day. When I worked for the newspaper, I once wrote a story about a woman who was reunited with her wedding ring years later when the people who had bought the house from the woman and her husband came upon it while doing some landscaping.

Doobins likes to made things and, one day, he made a long plastic-link chain made by stringing together a number of shorter Lego chains. Sometimes, he would twirl it so that it would wrap around his index finger. Even more fun was twirling it in a space-guzzling way that inevitably led to some other family member complaining that he was going to hit somebody with that if it wasn’t more careful. Either way, it proved to be a most-satisfying accessory. Spotting him carrying it as he headed toward the front door one day, Garnet said, “Don’t take that outside. You might lose it.”

“No, I won’t,” he said. When he came back in, he no longer had the chain. As we searched the front yard, I thought maybe this would be the day that my errant wedding ring would show up. It wasn’t. No chain either. The chain was long enough that I thought, surely, it has turn up when I mow the grass. Either I will find it before I run over it or I will see it shoot into the sky. Nope.

Not long after that, the dryer started eating way more socks than it usually does. It could be a coincidence but I can’t help thinking that seeing what the lawn got away with gave the dryer ideas: “If the yard can get away with absconding with Doobins’ chain, what’s to stop me from stealing some of those delightfully colorful of socks that Sparkle Girl just got?”

Nothing, apparently.