Today, a good friend approached me with a request that was atypical for her and absolutely familiar to me. “I lost a very expensive wedding ring, please help me find it.” After I got carried away with the instrumental search, many of my friends and acquaintances now have to listen to stories about another interesting find or how unexpectedly one and a half tons were removed metal from one pit. Why, it’s still more interesting than listening to stories about how aphids ate strawberries in the garden beds. Now it happens that on average three or four times a year I have to help look for wedding rings, expensive earrings or gold crosses with a chain. They once asked me to help find a good husband, but that’s another story. And so, I have already accumulated very solid experience in such searches. More than ten times definitely, and to be honest, I have not been able to find what I was looking for even once. I did not succeed. There was one case when, according to the owner’s assurances, the earring was returned to her by the brownie. But, first things first.
One day a girl from our common group of summer summer residents turned to me. Calling her a woman somehow doesn’t teach the language, even though she gave birth to three children, she looks all twenty-five. This means that the ring with the brulik has been lost – a gift from my husband for the birth of his daughter. Which made the loss a very hurtful loss. They called me literally an hour later, I arrived late in the evening, warning them that they would make sure that the place where they lost the ring was not trampled by the children.
A yard with a green lawn, a typical rural dacha for urban ones. A wooden house built in the 60s with a hipped roof, a large yard with a green trimmed lawn and a well-maintained vegetable garden with beds, greenhouses and currant bushes. I walked around for two hours, beeping with the device. Do you know what I mean? Yes!! Vodka corks from Khrushchev to Yeltsin. A rural yard is a place where all holidays were spent walking, tables in the yard and dancing until the morning to the accordion or reel-to-reel tape recorder.
No, I didn’t dig the lawn, otherwise my mother-in-law would have buried me next to me on the second dig. Let's take a more rational route. I localized the signal, and the kids on their knees looked at the grass all the way to the ground. If there was nothing on top, then it definitely wasn’t a ring. In general, after two hours of futile searches, everyone except the children calmed down, and they frantically demanded to continue the search for the pirate treasure. Afterwards, they gave me tea and cheesecake and I went home.
The second interesting story happened last summer. A neighbor came to my house. How's your neighbor? We live on the same street. And he says, so and so, the cow waved her tail and the earring was carried away from her ear somewhere. But the earrings are expensive and there is a shortage. It's a shame.
I take a metal detector, go into the barn, turn on the device and then I understand that the floors in the barn are made of iron. I ask the hostess about this, and she answers that it is so. After the collapse of the USSR, the starch plant was dismantled, whatever they could, they dragged it away. She and her husband brought cast iron tiles measuring half a meter by half a meter. And they paved the entire yard with those tiles, two barns and a cowshed.
I apologized on the spot and said that science is powerless here. Fisher Labs did not think that it was necessary to make a metal detector to search over iron floors in a rural barn.
However, a couple of days later the owner came and was pleased to say that the earring had been found. She went into the barn for two days and repeated “Brownie, brownie! I played, bring it back home.” So, on the second day, I was cleaning the cow’s feeder and then, in the dust, that same earring fell on the floor.
“Listen, can you find a pipe in the garden???” With this phrase from my friend, another story began, about the search for an important item for the owner of the house. The situation is a little unusual, and the backstory is as old as time. Two neighbors had a fight over a boundary line in their garden. A friend of mine has been living in his house for twenty years. The grandmother lived next door, lived and died, that’s what she lives for. The grandson became the owner of a rural house and did not show up for five years at all, and then there was a pandemic, self-isolation, a ban on travel to Spain. In general, the capital’s peasant fell in love with his family “estate.”
And then the question arose, “Why are you digging my garden?” There is no boundary, and the dispute is all about half a meter, but, as we understand, in such matters the point is not in the ground itself, it’s a matter of principle. They tried to sue, but again there was a pandemic, self-isolation, so the judge advised that such issues should be resolved independently, it would be cheaper. And then, they suddenly remembered that thirty years ago the garden was divided by iron posts with wire. So, they invited me, “Find us the places where those pillars stood, they were definitely concreted, so there should be something left in the ground.”
You should have seen this picture when I was in a freshly plowed garden at the border between plowing and mowed lawn, between two neighbors, by their mutual agreement, looking between plots. Thank God I didn’t find it. But my neighbor’s heart sank once when I clearly detected a volumetric iron signal on his territory. I dug up an iron can and felt better.
So this story remained. For six months the neighbors are friends, they say hello, invite you for tea, and share flower seedlings. And just like plowing a garden, that’s it. Swearing, swearing and good intentions.
These are my stories. There are also a few others, but there, some other time. And, on my own behalf, I will say thank you to all readers and, as always, I look forward to your stories in the comments.
