She didn’t even like diamonds. That was the funny thing. Costume jewelry, yes. A pair of handmade earrings, certainly. Diamonds, well, she’d always found them a bit showy.
She liked this one, though, because it had been Jim’s.
It was a man’s ring, a 1.3-carat diamond, round cut, set on a simple gold band, and when her husband, Jim, passed away a few years ago, Cindy Ware made it hers.
She wore it everywhere — to the grocery store, to lunch with friends, to her morning water aerobics class. It brought her comfort. A few times a day, she would look down at it, think of Jim, and smile.
“I never took it off,” says Cindy, who is 82 and impossibly sweet and sometimes wears a sweatshirt that says I’m often mistaken for an adult because of my age.
So when the diamond went missing last December, shortly before Christmas, Cindy was devastated. She felt sick, like she’d let Jim down.
She thought to herself: “Cindy, you just lose everything that’s important.”
A 60-year love story
Cindy Ware met the man she would marry in Pinkie Patterson’s second-grade class. This was in Mount Holly, N.C., in 1951. On Valentine’s Day of that year, while out sick with the mumps, Cindy had been allowed to come to the school parking lot to collect her Valentines.
The teacher sent a little boy out to deliver a box of treats.
He had a buzzcut and a little cowlick and his name was Jim.
Well, Cindy’s mother thought Jim was about the most precious little boy she had ever seen. And Cindy — who until that point hadn’t given it much thought — soon decided that maybe she agreed.
By high school, they were an item — inseparable, Cindy explains, “except when we were mad at each other and dated other people.”
They got together for good during college, and theirs was a 60-year love story.
They married in 1965. They moved to New Jersey, then to Pennsylvania. They raised three boys. Their boys grew up and had children of their own. A few years ago, they settled into a retirement community in Kennett Square, where they liked to take morning walks and eat pizza with mushrooms and pepperoni.
“We never needed a lot of anything else,” Cindy says. “Just the two of us.”
When Jim got sick, in 2020, it was horrible. Months of doctor’s visits, then specialist visits. Then, finally, hospice.
“The worst year of my life,” Cindy says.
Not long after Jim passed, in 2023, Cindy was getting the family’s affairs in order. One day, at a local bank, she opened an old lockbox and discovered a diamond ring — an heirloom that had been passed down through generations of Jim’s family.
Back when she and Jim married, and they didn’t have much money, he had told her she could have her pick: a ring or a car. “That’s a no-brainer,” she had replied. “I want a car.”
Still, something about the diamond spoke to her.
She plucked it from the lockbox and slid it onto her middle finger, and that’s where it remained for the next three years.
The missing diamond
She was having lunch with a friend last December when she glanced down and realized it was gone.
The diamond had dislodged from the setting, and it was nowhere to be found.
“I was just bereft,” Cindy says.
It could have been anywhere. In her car. In the grass outside her home.
At one point, she wondered whether she had lost it during her water aerobics class at the retirement community’s swimming pool. Things could get a little intense with the arm exercises. Maybe it had jostled loose and sunk to the bottom.
But what could be done? Even if they drained the pool, the likelihood of them ever finding the diamond was minuscule.
Her sons urged her not to worry, assured her that it was OK. There was always the chance that it might still turn up.
But weeks passed, then months.
Eventually, she resigned herself to the fact that the diamond was never coming back.
‘That might be a diamond’
One afternoon a couple weeks ago — on a pool deck 1,100 miles from Kennett Square — a man named Coleman looked down and noticed, lodged in the tread of his Lands End pool shoe, what appeared to be a small piece of glass.
Or wait. Maybe it was some kind of gem.
For days he had been wearing the pool shoes — to the pool, through locker rooms. He had stuffed them into his gym bag, into a suitcase. Earlier that day, he had worn them on a walk in the gritty sand of a South Florida beach.
He also wore them back home in Kennett Square, where he lived in a retirement community. In the afternoons — after the ladies finished their morning water aerobics — Coleman’s group played pool volleyball. He always wore his pool shoes during games.
Now, sitting poolside in Florida, Coleman’s husband, John, examined the stone and said, “Uh, that might be a diamond.”
Intrigued, but not yet convinced, the couple went the following day to a Pompano Beach jeweler.
Nine times out of 10, the jeweler told them, when people think they’ve found a diamond, it turns out to be nothing.
This was not one of those times.
Yes, the jeweler said, it was a diamond, all right — 1.3 carats, nicely colored, likely from the 1950s or ’60s. Probably worth a bit of money.
Tickled, Coleman posted a photo of the diamond to Facebook.
A diamond in the sole of his shoe
Back in Pennsylvania, Cindy was on the phone with her good friend.
It was Valentine’s Day, and the two were chatting about this and that, and at the end of their conversation, in passing, her friend mentioned a man from their neighborhood, Coleman, who had just posted a photo from Florida.
Apparently, he had found a diamond lodged in his shoe.
As it happened, Cindy and Coleman knew each other well. They lived just a couple streets apart, worked out in the same pool. Once, when Jim was in hospice, Coleman and his husband had brought her flowers.
Cindy tracked down the photo. Saw the small gem lodged in her neighbor’s pool shoe.
Impossible, she thought.
She dialed Coleman’s number.
“Hello,” she said, “I think you have my diamond.”
The return
It was confirmed a day later.
Back from Florida, Coleman delivered the diamond to Cindy’s house, along with a collection of yellow roses. Neither of them could stop smiling.
Best they can tell, the diamond fell to the bottom of the community pool, where Coleman — while playing pool volleyball — happened to step on it, just right. How it had remained lodged in his shoe’s tread for days or weeks or months — across multiple states — was anyone’s guess.
“It could never happen in a million thousand years,” Cindy says.
Says Coleman, “It does make you sit back and think for a minute about what is going on here.”
As you might imagine, their story has been the talk of their retirement community. Everyone, it seems, wants to talk about the little diamond that traveled halfway across the country in a shoe.
As for the diamond itself, Cindy has decided that it‘s time to pass it on, to her oldest son.
“I can no longer be trusted,” she jokes.
In the meantime, she has stopped wearing it to water aerobics.
