There is truly something special when it comes to finding things that you have spent days searching for when they appear when you least expect it.
Jane Fine Foster was walking through the streets of downtown Grand Junction, Colorado, when something inside an old antique-shop window caught her gaze. How or why she found that old wedding photo, nestled in that window display, she couldn’t really explain.
While running an errand in February 2017, the older woman, Jane, stopped in her tracks and couldn’t believe her eyes. “Can that be?” she asked herself. It was! She actually screamed out loud when she saw an old photograph of a woman in a wedding dress inside A Robin’s Nest antique store.
So who was it in the photo who caused Jane so much excitement?
There were three old, black-and-white photographs in the picture frame of a young, slender woman in a wedding dress, and that woman, Jane knew, was her very own mother on her wedding day, back in June of 1948.
Jane entered the store, grasped the picture frame, and pressed it to her heart.
It turned out that some of her family’s possessions had been confiscated after they had forgotten to make a payment on a storage locker over a decade ago, and all of the items had been auctioned off.
However, there was something even more special in store (quite literally) at A Robin’s Nest, yet another memory from that same memorable day.
“As I stood at the checkout counter, the lovely co-owner, Robin Allerheiligen asked why I was purchasing the picture of the lovely bride? I responded tearfully that she was my mother,” Jane recalled.
“At that moment, Robin’s husband, Shane, who had been working nearby, approached the desk to hear more. I repeated the sad tale again... to which he held up his hand and said, ‘Wait here, I think I have something else you'd be interested in,’” she further added.
Soon, the couple returned with a large box. The antique shop had in their possession the very same wedding dress that was in the photo—Jane’s mom’s very own wedding dress—and it was still wrapped in the original newspaper, which was dated just two days after the day the wedding had taken place.
Reminiscing the whole incident, Jane said, “This tipped me over the emotional edge and I sobbed.”
Jane then asked the shopkeeper what she would have to pay to have her precious memories returned to her family, and she recalled them saying, “there was no price for me; that the gown had made it back to its family as it belonged to us.”
She also added, “They were so thrilled to see not only the gown but the picture of the beautiful bride who wore it find its way back home.”
Yet this fortuitous coincidence is inexplicable to Jane. She concluded her post writing: “It is so amazing that after so many years (and possibly up to 4 or more antique dealers) our mother’s photo AND gown have returned to us.... serendipitously....... or was there a greater plan. Maybe she is sending us a message??”
Friends Read Free