A wedding ring is one of the most important pieces of jewelry you'll ever wear, a symbol of one's undying love and commitment.
And that's why a Nova Scotia woman named Natalie Aalders was so surprised to hear that -- six decades ago -- her grandfather had traded his wedding ring for a pint of beer.
Natalie Aalders said her grandfather has always claimed to have lost his wedding ring down a drain while doing kitchen duty during his military service in Halifax in the 1950s. But he came clean to his granddaughter -- and to the rest of the family -- after Natalie Aalders' recent wedding, according to the Canadian Broadcasting Corp.
Apparently, his wife had long suspected that he had made up the kitchen sink story.
"She wasn't surprised. She knew he had had a drinking problem and had to get him out [of] a few jams," Natalie Aalders said.
The woman's aim is to hunt down the ring so that she can return it to her now 80-year-old grandfather, who is still married to her grandmother and living in Nova Scotia. (He has never replaced the ring.) She's put an ad on an online classified website but has yet to receive any substantial leads.
"I imagine the ring is long gone, but figured I would post this on the far off chance that someone would remember him and still have the ring, and possibly discuss how I can get it back for him while he is still around, maybe in time for Christmas," she wrote in the ad.
Aalders noted that her grandfather gave up drinking a long time ago.
Certainly stranger things have happened than a ring turning up decades after it was lost.
A woman named Brenda Caunter lost her wedding band 41 years ago while gardening in her yard. She and husband Dave searched for the ring to no avail, and Dave ended up replacing the nine carat ring, according to The Daily Mail.
But in September, more than four decades after the ring went missing, it was reunited with its owner. The husband spotted one of their neighbors using a metal detector and asked him to check the area where his wife had lost the ring, on the off chance that it might still be there. And sure enough, it was.