A ring that was lost in a department store bathroom in Maine in 1973 has been found 47 years later in a small town in Finland.
Debra McKenna, 63, was given the high school ring by her late husband Shawn when they first started dating when she was 16.
But she lost it when she took it off to wash her hands after using the bathroom in a store in their home city of Portland.
She assumed she’d never see it again, but incredibly it was found 3,750 miles away last month in Kaarina, a small town in southwest Finland. Mrs McKenna is at a loss to explain how it ended up in Europe.
Sheet metal worker Marko Saarinen found the silver, blue-stoned ring with his metal detector in a park under eight inches of soil.
Debra McKenna, 63, was given the high school ring by her late husband Shawn when they first started dating when she was 16
She assumed she’d never see it again, but incredibly it was found 3,750 miles away last month in Kaarina, a small town in southwest Finland
He managed to trace the owner because it has Shawn’s initials on it, the name of Portland’s Morse High School where he was a student and the year he left, 1973.
Saarinen contacted the school who put the word out that it had been found and then posted it to a delighted and astonished McKenna last week.
‘There was a lot of weeping when I learned that someone found it and made the effort to reach out and find me,’ said McKenna, a retired hairdresser whose husband died three years ago after battling cancer.
Speaking from her Brunswick home, she added: ‘It´s very touching in this world of negativity, to have decent people step forward and make an effort.
‘There are good people in the world, and we need more of them.’
She said Shawn, who was president of the senior class, had given her the ring before he left to go to college in Orono. The couple married when she was 21 and had three children.
She said: ‘He first asked me out on Valentine’s Day 1973. He left a little note in my coat pocket at school.’
They had their first date three days later, on a Friday night, going to a party at the Phippsburg Grange Hall. She was 16. He was president of the senior class.
McKenna lost the ring soon after she got it when she went to the Porteous, Mitchell & Braun Co. department store.
She went to the restroom and took it off while she washed her hands and then left it there.
The couple married in 1977 when she was 21 and they went on to have three children
She said: ‘I left my name and number [at the store] but never got contacted by anybody, and that was it, I never saw it again.’
Shawn didn’t mind when he found out.
‘He said, ‘It’s just a ring,” McKenna said. ‘He was cool with it.’
Mrs McKenna worked as a hairdresser while her husband, with whom she had three children, was an entrepreneur and adjunct college professor, reports the Bangor Daily News.
‘I feel very lucky. I count my blessings every day. He was such a giving person, a deeply good person,’ McKenna said.
McKenna says she would love to know how the ring ended up in Finland.
‘I wish it could talk,’ she said. ‘I would love to hear the story of how it got from here to there, and if anyone ever knows what it is, I would love to hear what it is. No judgment, just interest.’
‘Shawn used to say there’s no such thing as coincidences,’ McKenna said, but she’s convinced that her late husband is trying to send her a message.
‘He’s telling me to get my act together. To get going with the rest of my life,’ McKenna said.
McKenna hasn’t spoken to Saarinen yet, but the alumni association sent him a Morse High School hoodie in thanks.