I knelt on some loose shale to take a picture of Kindra sitting on a rock.
It was about 10 feet from the water’s edge, but Lake Eufaula seemed to be down several feet. Where I was standing probably would have been waist deep at normal lake level.
I took the picture and was about to push my myself to my feet when I noticed something round by my foot. It was about the size of a dime and crusted with silt.
It was a ring. A blue metal ring that looked like a woman’s non-traditional wedding band.
It was a perfect fit for the ring finger on Kindra’s right hand. Based on that, I deduced that it had been worn by a kind-hearted woman about 5 feet, 2 inches tall who has reddish brown hair and occasionally tries to pass herself off as standing 5-3.
The question was: How did the ring get in waist-deep water in Lake Eufaula?
Kindra and I speculated a bit and came up with three scenarios.
My first thought was that the woman in question was a noodler who had gotten hold of a large flathead. As they were wrestling, the beast had stripped the ring off her finger and made its escape while she looked for the ring.
The woman had groped in the silt, but to no avail, and the ring laid where it landed, Titaniclike, until I found it.
We can suppose that a red-haired woman from, say, Antlers, has been telling the story for years now about the time a 60-pound flathead stole her wedding ring.
This is my favorite scenario, but I found the ring on a smooth, sloping bank. No holes, trees or large rocks like you’d find in prime noodling water, so it’s unlikely that it’s a legit scenario.
Scenario No. 2 was that the ring was slightly loose and the woman was afraid it would come off in the water while she frolicked with her family.
So, she slipped it into the pocket of her shorts, unaware that there was a dime-sized hole in the pocket. Mid-frolic, as she ducked from a sevenyear-old shooting her with a water cannon, the ring worked through the hole and fluttered to the bank beneath her feet.
Only later, when it was time to roast hot dogs, did she notice it was missing.
Scenario No. 3 was that the woman finally had all she could take of being married to a philandering scoundrel and decided to make a statement by going to Lake Eufaula at sunset and flinging the ring as far as she could.
She side-armed it into the lapping waves, and it sank with little splash and even less regret.
We brought the ring home and Kindra cleaned it. It’s a pretty, shiny blue and Kindra calls it A Ring With A Story. We’re just not exactly sure what the story is.
So, if you are a kind-hearted woman with reddish brown hair who is 5-2 but aspires to be 5-3 and can tell us how the ring got into Lake Eufaula, please do.
We’d love to hear the story and see if we came close to getting it right.
And if you want it back, tell me what’s engraved inside the ring.