When Renee Worthing was reading Facebook posts on Sunday, she saw one that touched her. A young woman, Sammi Berard, had lost her engagement ring and was hoping someone would find it.
The ring was lost on the weekend, on busy Jagger Mill Road in Sanford. Berard and her fiancé Matt Hodsdon looked for four hours, using a metal detector, but came up empty-handed. Others looked too.
Worthing didn’t know Berard, but the posting struck her.
“It broke my heart,” said Worthing, imagining how Berard must have felt.
So on Monday, when Worthing was driving home from work, she stopped on Jagger Mill Road and had a look. She searched the area where Berard said she lost the ring, but she too, came up empty-handed.
Worthing isn’t Catholic, but she said a prayer to St. Anthony, known as the saint of lost things.
On Tuesday, Worthing left her house for work at 7 a.m.
“I said ‘I am going to go find the ring,’” she said.
At 7:24 a.m., she did, right on the fog line, in the same area she’d searched the day before.
When the two met on Wednesday afternoon, there were tears as Worthing reached into her pocket and turned the square-cut ring over to Berard.
“I just wanted to find it for you,” said Worthing.
“It means to much to me,” said Berard.
Hodsdon, her fiancé, first proposed to Berard in late December. In the spring, when there was still some snow on the ground, the couple took a trip to North Conway, New Hampshire, and stopped off at a jewelry store.
“He told me to pick one out ‘because I want to marry you,’” Berard said her fiancé told her.
They’ve set a wedding date for June 23, next year.
Berard was in the passenger seat as the couple was driving down Jagger Mill Road on Saturday. She’d recently had a bout of flu and lost some weight. Berard said the window was open, and she was talking with her hands when the ring swooped off her finger, bounced on the interior of the car and flew out the window. They searched and searched, to no avail.
When she found the ring on Tuesday, Worthing sent Berard a message and at first heard nothing — Berard works second shift and was sleeping with her phone turned off. So Worthing posted about her find on the Facebook thread and the congratulatory messages started pouring in. One posting came from Berard’s sister, and when she awoke, she had a message to call her. Then her fiancé told her to look on Facebook, where Worthing posted that she had found the engagement ring.
Worthing said her prayer to St. Anthony did the trick — as it did for her a week ago when she couldn’t find her debit card, despite thoroughly examining her wallet. She said the prayer, waited a bit, and then looked in the wallet again, and the card was there, where it was supposed to be, she said.
“My grandson says “nothing is really lost til Gigi can’t find it,’” said Worthing.
As to the engagement ring?
“I haven’t stopped smiling,” said Berard as she gazed at her ring. “I’m so happy. We looked for hours. I felt no one would find it.”
“I’ll never forget you,’ she told Worthing as she thanked her.