Waiting for the Next Thing to Go Missing

On faith, superstition, and the small ways I keep testing whether the universe is listening

My brother-in-law, Todd, my diamond in his hand. Libbey Bowl. Ojai, California

I was drinking my morning coffee when I brushed my hand over my wedding ring and felt something wrong. A hole where the diamond should be, a metal claw holding nothing. It’s one of the only pieces of real jewelry I own, the one I cherish most, and all that was left of it was a piece of rough white gold.

I searched the bed and shook out the sheets and pillowcases. I crawled on my knees through the house, sweeping every corner. I cried out loud to Saint Anthony, the patron saint of lost things, “Please help me.” Talking to him is an old family habit, handed down by generations who believe saints listen, the universe communicates constantly, and objects carry meaning.

This is how I think. I'm terrified of losing the people I love, and even more terrified that losing things means more loss to come. My husband, Michael, once caught something that nearly killed him: a diagnosis of Valley Fever that turned our world from tranquil to terrifying. So when I felt that hole where the diamond should be, the large superstitious part of me went somewhere dark. Did this mean something worse was coming for us or for any of the people I love? I tend to spiral like that.

My Italian father, Andrew, wore a gold cornicello around his neck, a little twisted horn meant to protect against the evil eye and ward off bad luck. My Irish mother, Peggy, would come out of her skin if you opened an umbrella indoors, wouldn’t let a pair of shoes or a hat near a bed, and if her palm was itching, checked if it was the left hand, which meant money coming, or the right hand, which meant money going. They believed losing something could be a message worth reading.

This wasn’t the first time Saint Anthony and I had been through something like this. A couple of years earlier, I’d spent two anniversaries mourning a poem my husband had written me, one with the words “dragons beware” in it, words that deeply moved me because, in my family, protection is how you recognize love. A man who would stand between me and the fire and fight off the dragons, every last one of them. I looked everywhere for that poem—drawers, files, inside books I hadn’t opened in a decade. I’d all but given up when my son, Andy, mentioned that an old website of mine might still exist somewhere in the internet’s memory. It did. I already knew Saint Anthony works on his own schedule. I hadn’t expected to need him again so soon.

I didn’t want to think about the night before. If it had come loose then, the odds of ever finding it felt like zero.

My friend Michelle and I had been circling each other for years, the way close friends do when life keeps interrupting the plan to actually see each other. So when we finally set a date, an Ani DiFranco show at the Libbey Bowl in Ojai, it felt overdue.

The Bowl sits inside a park that feels less like a park and more like a forest. We spread a blanket on the grass and ate our seeded crackers and salmon salad while the opening act played, catching up on years in an hour. We drank kombucha and wine, laughing about nothing in particular, just glad to be sitting together again.

As the sun dropped, we made our way to our seats, past a large sycamore tree over two hundred years old, bent so far down that its top curved into the ground and took root, forming an arch you can walk through. The story goes that the Chumash people bent it that way on purpose to mark a trail or a good camping spot, and that the Great Spirit would join two lovers who walked through the arch together. Locals call it the marriage tree.

We stood in awe, saying little, our arms around each other. I don’t know exactly what we felt standing near it, only that it felt close to spiritual. Partway through the show, Ani stopped and commented on the tree herself, and I remember thinking, so it’s not just us. She was amazing that night. By the end, I was clapping so hard my hands hurt.

When the concert ended, we walked through the darkness in what felt like woods, our feet crunching through layers of leaves on the path back to the car—a good day with a friend I missed. We vowed never to let time escape us.

We kept talking for the whole drive back to my house about faith, fate, and cosmic connections. I said these words out loud, "I'm not religious," and then caught myself because it isn't quite accurate. There's that stretch of time I don't usually bring up, but somehow it became part of our conversation that night, when my husband was in the ICU with doctors preparing me for the worst. I told her I taped pictures of saints all over his hospital room, and pictures of him too, so the medical staff who already knew him as a doctor would also see how loved he was. And while I'm not religious, at least in the biblical sense, I've had more prayers answered in my life than I can chalk up to coincidence.

Michelle was raised wild, in a religious cult in the woods. I was raised Italian, Catholic, in a mob world that ran on its own kind of unquestioned devotion. Neither of us believes in the religion we were handed, and neither of us has let go of everything. She gets her spirituality from trees, rocks, and mountain streams. I get mine from old churches with wooden pews worn down by other people's knees, and my collection of vintage saints found in antique stores or handed down from relatives who've passed. I touch their heads as I pass for good luck.

None of it had anything to do with the diamond. I didn’t even know it was gone yet. We spent an hour talking about fear and faith, things neither of us could explain.

My best friend, Joanne, called the next morning, before I’d even had a chance to call her. She’s Italian too, raised the way I was, saints on the dresser, holy water by the front door, crucifixes on the bedroom walls. I was sobbing when I picked up, and when I told her what was lost, she said these words: “It will find its way back to you.”

My sister, Gina, lives in Ojai, a place she calls magical. She chairs the city’s Historic Preservation Commission. She can explain why a building matters and why it needs protecting with such passion, you’d think she was talking about her own children. She’s the one who’d walked us to the Bowl the night before, giving us the whole tour as we went, what wood a restaurant’s wall was built from, who that person was we’d just passed on the sidewalk, a running history lesson. I almost didn’t call her. Weekends are sacred time with her husband, Todd, and I didn’t want to interrupt that over a ring.

It never occurred to me to ask her to look. Finding a diamond that small in a park full of leaves felt like a lost cause, like finding a needle in a haystack.

When I finally called, she didn’t even pause. “I’m going to go find it,” she said. Not a “will text you back later” or a sad face emoji. My sister just put on her shoes.

She and her husband went back to the Bowl where an extra night of leaves had fallen since we’d left. On the walk over, she told me that she, too, had summoned Saint Anthony. As she searched, she’d vowed to turn over every single leaf if that’s what it took. And then my phone rang. It was her, on FaceTime.

“Is this your diamond?” she said, holding something small and bright in her palm.

“Where…how?” I said. It was all I could get out.

“Under a leaf, near the tree.”

A stone that size, in a park full of two hundred years of leaves, found within hours, by someone who wasn’t even looking under the tree, just around it. The same tree I’d stood beneath the night before, feeling something cosmic, something almost divine. The same ground that gave me that feeling gave the diamond back too. It’s the same thing that happened with the poem. Something I loved was gone, and then someone who loved me found it.

My husband once stood up at our wedding and said the gods had blown us apart when we were young, only to bring us back together. I don’t know if I believe in gods, at least not in the way the word is usually used. Nor do I think of myself as a religious woman. But I keep ending up with the same idea anyway, whether it’s coming from a saint, a sister, a two-hundred-year-old tree, or a husband thanking gods he doesn’t fully believe in either.

I called out loud for help, the way my family always has, and someone came looking before I’d even finished asking, holding out exactly what I thought was gone for good, and saying, Not so fast. This one’s still yours.