A Story About a House, a Ring and Love.

Today was the first day of my writer's class. I'm registered to take it every Tuesday for two hours in the early afternoon and I believe it will greatly help me to be a better business writer and a better marketing expert for my clients.

We had a very interesting class today.
We were each asked to write down a fortune (the kind you would find in a fortune cookie) of some kind on a piece of paper and then put it in a hat.
Afterwards Brian, our teacher, brought the hat around to each of us and asked us to pick one (they were all folded up so we didn't know what we were getting) and then take 20 minutes to write a story that relates to the essence of that fortune.

I decided to write about something that I know best, a house. At the end of my story (which will stretch over many weeks with one short chapter each week), I'll let you guess what my fortune said.  The winner will receive an interesting prize.

And so the story begins......

A Story About a House, a Ring and Love.

We had moved into our new house in an older section of an eastern Lake Ontario city and had almost finished with the unpacking and placing of items. The place was livable enough so I decided to take advantage of the warm summer day and do some work in the overgrown garden out back.

Donning my old, weathered gardening gloves and faded, yellow straw hat, I headed downstairs to the basement where a large, splintery wooden door opened out onto the uneven brick path that lead down to a shady bed of perennials.

The garden lay in a mass of tangled disarray and an unseasoned eye would have had a hard time distinguishing a weed from a fall-blooming perennial, however, after years of gardening and having read many books, I felt confident with my weeding skills and proceeded to remove large clumps of thistles, crabgrass and wild asters from the tired old garden.

I had been weeding for quite awhile when I began to notice that the soil around the perennials was becoming loosened and friable so I decided to cultivate it with a rusty old blue trowel I had found on a shelf in the basement.

The soil felt soft and crumbly beneath the blade and as the sad garden began to take shape, I decided to stand up for a well deserved cat stretch.
Upon standing for a bit, my gaze wandered back down to where my work awaited me. Caught unawares, I was taken slightly aback when my eye caught something glinting in the meagre streams of sunlight that eked their way down through the ancient pine branches overhead.

As I wiped some beads of sweat from my forehead and pushed a wayward strand of hair out of my tired eyes, I reached down to pick up what I thought was a tiny shard of weathered glass.

My rough leather glove held the tiny, soiled object and in an endeavour to determine it's nature, I removed my remaining glove to brush away the caked on dirt that had gathered over the years.
A tiny gold ring presented itself from within a large clod of hardened clay. With great interest I set down my gloves and dusty hat and decided to go inside where I could wash the delicate ring in a bowl of clear water.

Once clean, I held the beautiful, old ring up to the light and watched the colours dance off of the intricately cut solitary diamond in the centre of the filigreed setting.
Upon doing so, I noticed that the ring had been engraved completely around the inside of the fine gold band.

On closer inspection, the words 'I love you 'THIS MUCH'' made themselves known to me and I was intrigued to see a tiny circle engraved next to the words 'THIS MUCH'.

I felt a small tug at my heart as I began to wonder who had been the recipient of this beautiful ring and, even moreso, who had been the giver.
Surely their's had been a great love and the ring's owner must have been devastated to have lost it in the garden all those years ago.
I placed the ring in a tiny  bowl on a shelf and headed back out to continue the work that awaited me.

As I walked down the weathered, old, uneven garden path, I made a solemn vow to myself to do some exploring around the neighbourhood in the coming days.
I was determined to find out who had once lived in the grand old house and might have been the wearer of this very special ring.

©2010JoSmith