We are taking time out of crazy stories to bring you a nice one. 36 years ago a woman lost her engagement ring when it fell down the toilet. Nearly four decades later the ring resurfaced. Click below to find out more.
Terry and Donna Claver of Stanford, Montana will be savoring their 2011 Thanksgiving for a long time, and not because of the turkey or the stuffing.
Terry Claver found the engagement ring his wife had accidentally dropped in the toilet 36 years earlier.
“This whole ring story is a timing story,” Donna Claver tells The Billings Gazette. “It’s the story of God’s timing and it’s the story of His favor.”
Terry gave the ring to Donna in 1973, not long before they were married. In fact, they only had three dates before deciding to tie the knot.
Eighteen months after getting married, a very pregnant Donna took off the ring in the bathroom and carefully put it on the lid of the toilet.
“I remember putting it on the back of the toilet to put lotion on,” Donna Claver told The Gazette. “I saw it slip toward the toilet bowl, and I went to grab it, but I missed and it fell in. It went right down into the little hole at the bottom of the toilet. I could put my finger in that hole and feel it with the tip of my finger, but it was wedged in tight.”
The couple drained the toilet and took it off the floor, but nothing worked. So they gave up – for the moment.
“We had only been married a year and a half and were expecting our first child,” Donna Claver tells The Gazette. “We didn’t have a lot of extra cash for a new toilet, so we just put it back.”
The Clavers would sell the house a few years later, and it’s been resold several times since then. The ring seemed to be permanently lost.
In November of this year, though, “God’s timing” came into play. Terry Claver and his son happened to be working on a house across the street from his old home when he saw hunters, who use the house periodically, carrying the toilet away. The toilet’s tank was broken, and they were going to throw it out. Terry asked them if he could throw the toilet away himself.
“I put it in the back of my pickup and drove it into the shop,” Terry Claver tells The Gazette. “I got a sledgehammer, and I whacked it. The base of the toilet fell down on the truck’s end gate, and right in the center where the little hole would have been was the ring.”
The Clavers had retrieved their ring, which miraculously was in good shape despite being trapped in a toilet for 36 years.
“If we would have got the ring back six weeks after we lost it, we probably wouldn’t have remembered it,” Terry Claver tells the newspaper. “Every marriage goes through its seasons. Sometimes you think everything the other person does is cute, and other times you can’t stand to be around them. Finding the ring brought back the same original feelings we had when we were kids. It was a gift from God that made those feelings strong again.”
