Lost Ring Found After 40 Years at Second Chance
Although she hadn’t seen it in 40 years, Mary Estrada recognized the ring. She knew it was the one she had lost so long ago.
Estrada hadn’t been to Second Chance Emporium for years, since the old store was flooded in Hurricane Harvey and the non-profit second-hand shop reopened in a new building on South Reynolds St. in La Grange. She came on a Friday, stopping first at the jewelry case just inside the door.
And she saw it.
“When I saw that ring, something came over me,” she recalls. “I got chills. I got tears in my eyes. It was my first time coming here. I couldn’t believe it.”
Estrada examined the ring, looking for a telltale sign that it was the one she lost four decades ago. She thought it was and so she asked the store’s volunteers to set it aside while she hurried home to Waelder to tell her husband, Felix. “He didn’t believe me,” Mary recalled. “He had to see it.”
Felix grew up in Flatonia and Mary was from Waelder. The two met at a CYO dance in Flatonia some time in 1968 or ’69. Soon, Felix decided to buy Mary something special.
Felix recalls ordering the ring from a Nikel’s jewelry store and watch repair in Flatonia some time in 1970. The ring was unusual. It had a floral design, with six petals surrounding a dark stone. “It was different from any other ring I’d seen,” Felix said.
Felix thought he would give the ring to Mary as a Christmas gift. But duty called. Felix went into the military in 1970 and was long gone from Texas by Christmas. His sister made sure Mary got the ring. She put it on and waited for Felix to come home.
“When I got it, I wore the heck out of it,” Mary says of the ring. She loved it, and worried when one of the petals caught on something and the metal was slightly bent. She thought about getting it fixed, but didn’t. She like it the way it was.
In January of 1973, Felix and Mary married. And then one day in 1980 Mary couldn’t find the ring. “We searched the house everywhere,” Mary said.
They both think Mary had removed the ring and put it in a purse. The purse must have gotten mixed in with other items Mary was selling at her periodic yard sales. She figures she sold the purse with the ring and it was gone.
Until now.
Forty years after a yard sale — and after who knows how many gifts, moves and sales – somebody donated the six-petal flower ring to the shop on South Reynolds.
Felix looked at the ring and was certain it was the one he had bought five decades before. Mary was convinced when she looked for the telltale bent petal she had worried about long ago. Yes, the petal is still slightly crooked. It was hers.
“I’ve been telling my friends about this place,” she said this Saturday, sitting outside Second Chance. “And now they all say, ‘We have to go.’”