The Ring, Part 2

The day after Maria’s wedding ring turned up in the bathroom jewelry box - a place she says she never puts it - we were having breakfast in the kitchen when she noticed she wasn’t wearing her ring.
That was especially startling, considering the anxiety we’d just gone through leading up to its discovery.
She dashed upstairs to search, only to discover the ring was back in the jewelry box in the same drawer, in the same spot in the drawer.
Again, she swore she had absolutely no recollection of having taken the ring off or of putting it into the box.
This, of course, left us with a couple of possibilities:
1. The painkilling drugs she’d taken a week earlier in the wake of her hysterectomy were still kicking around in her nervous system and making her do things she normally wouldn’t do and couldn’t remember, or
2. There was some supernatural explanation.
I’m not ruling out either scenario.
She hadn’t had any of the pain meds for at least a week and wasn’t having any other noticeable lapses in memory of judgment.
At the same time, she and her daughter claim to have sensed the presence of my late mother in the house at various times and the central stone in Maria’s wedding ring did come from my mother’s engagement ring.
Her daughter Morgan said she’d “seen” my mother a couple of times when she was sick - once when she was recuperating from oral surgery. Mom was a Registered Nurse and I suppose it would be natural for her to show up when someone in the house needed nursing. And, of course, Maria was recuperating from a hysterectomy.
I’ve always been blissfully oblivious to these “presences” and apparitions, although I sometimes think Mom takes possession of our dog Ruthie when I catch Ruthie giving me that reproachful look that Mom used to shoot me whenever she disapproved of something I’d done or said.
Maria says she’s seen and experienced ghosts and spirits numerous times since her childhood and I don’t disbelieve her. I just don’t see them.
Maria’s mother also claims to have been “visited” by the spirit of her mother. Over one period of time, she said, she found a succession of face-up pennies on or around her desk and recalled that her mother considered it good luck to find a face-up penny. After that, she said, she began finding diabetes blood test strips around the desk and between the pages of books. She took it as an indication that her mother was visiting and saying hello.
Whenever Maria has found the presence of spirits bothersome, she tells them in a loud, firm voice to leave and apparently they do.
In this most recent case, she said she had a chat with my mother and told her it was okay to hang around, just stop messing with her wedding ring.
Now, five days later, the ring is still on Maria’s finger and we’ve had no more problems.
I’m withholding judgment. I learned a long time ago to believe nothing and believe everything.