What’s the oldest things you’re wearing today?

I look down at my left hand and see a familiar sight. My engagement ring. How long has it been there? Nearly thirty years.

It really wasn’t an engagement ring when my boyfriend gave it to me, so many years ago. He’d been married before and so had I. Neither of us were rushing into a relationship.

He gave it to me in a very clever and sweet way. He handed me a very large box, a bit heavy. I opened it, and inside was an empty box with a note that said “Find the little blue church”.

That had me thinking. Where would I find a blue church? Then I remembered we had decorated the Christmas tree and one of the ornaments was a little blue church. I started checking the tree, expecting a bracelet or necklace hanging off it.

However, when I found it, it was just the little blue church, with a note on the bottom. It said, “turn around.”

I did, and there was my boyfriend holding up a ring box kneeling in front of me. I burst into tears.

He said, since we’d both been married before, it wasn’t an official engagement ring but he was promising to be with me for the rest of his life.

The ring is gorgeous, a marquis cut diamond with baguettes on one side and tiny diamonds on the other. Along with it, I now wear an anniversary ring.

Two years after he gave me the ring he proposed and we got married. This time it was a huge surprise. He woke up one morning and said, “I’m ready. Let’s go get married”. We skipped work, kept my daughter out of school and we all went to the county courthouse. My daughter was our witness. It was fast, easy and totally blew me away. We went shopping for a wedding ring and made it official.

He and I celebrated 27 years at our last anniversary. We have another celebration on the day he gave me my ring, two years earlier.

What do you know. It was an engagement ring after all.