It happens once a week, every week in just about every neighborhood but Wednesday’s garbage run on Folsom’s Kidder Way was a little different, like heart-racing, stomach sinking different.
“I went to put on my rings on and realized they weren’t right where I normally leave them and then I ran upstairs but they weren’t there,” Andria Saint-Evens said. “It was almost surreal. I just started crying.”
Andria Saint-Evens tried to trash her trepidation by sending son Bryce out to grab their bags out of the garbage but the crews had already collected.
“This diamond is my great-grandmother’s it’s 100 years old,” Saint-Evens said.
Cleaning her rings before her 19th wedding anniversary next month almost did way with what she used to say I do.
Almost because a call to the city’s Solid Waste Department stopped the truck hauling her neighborhood’s trash and started a fine sifting process through about 300 cans worth of what everyone near her had thrown away.
“Well at first I was a little skeptical but when we got out there and I saw Andria and how distraught she was. I thought we’re gonna find this ring,” Dennis Conger, with Folsom Solid Waste, said.
And as unlikely as it sounds, in about 30 minutes of Saint-Evens, her husband and two city workers rummaging through refuse…
“I dug through and it wasn’t there and third bag I was on my last paper towel cause I knew I set it on a paper towel and I heard this ‘tink’ and both of my rings fell out of the paper towel,” Saint-Evens said.
“When she said there they are, that was great, I mean it was fantastic,” Conger said.
Now out of their grubbies, donned for going through the garbage, hugs over a remarkable find thanks to what Saint-Evens says is remarkable Folsom.
“It just made me feel so good that they were treating me like I was their daughter,” Saint-Evens said. “If they hadn’t been willing to dump it out and search with me. It would be gone and I would have lost a piece of my family history that was so important.”
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