"I knew I lost it right away," Dyson told the Sun Thisweek newspaper. "We dumped out the bags of leaves and looked everywhere, but we never found it."
Dyson, who now lives in Rosemount, Minn., paid a visit to Belgrade with her daughter, Nancy Dyson, and her partner, Jason Jacques, and they decided to go look at her old house.
With the permission of the current resident, Jacques, who has a metal detecting hobby, used his metal detector to search the yard for the long-lost ring.
"They could have had a major sewer project or landscaping," Dyson said. "After about 15 minutes, Jason came up to me with his hands clenched. It gives me goosebumps now. He flip his hands over. On top of that big clump of dirt, there was my ring."
She said manufacturer Jostens determined the ring was still under warranty and is cleaning, repairing and resizing the ring so it can return to her finger.
"I told them the story," Dyson said. "They said we would be happy to clean it and repair it and size it. It was still under warranty."
A similar recovery occurred recently in Louisiana, when Drew Thornton found a ring while working in the sewer under Southern University in Baton Rouge. The ring belonged to Monica Alexander, who had lost the ring down a shower drain 27 years earlier.
