I was in the jams and jellies section of the Martha’s Vineyard Agricultural Fair when my cell phone rang. My mother had a third prize ribbon for her beach plum jelly, although a judge had mysteriously written, “Excellent grape!” on it.

“Can you talk?” Martin asked, calling from the house phone in Ballard.

I stepped outside the barn, waving to my mother as she set off for fried food.

“I have very bad news,” Martin said.

My heart skipped a little beat, thinking to the neighbors awaiting the birth of twin grandbabies, the cats…even the safety of Ballard itself. Had Ray’s Boathouse gone up in flames, again?

“My wedding ring is missing,” Martin said.

It was twilight at the fairgrounds. The Ferris Wheel was starting to twinkle against the sky as it rounded down toward the gymnastics exhibition and then back up again, high as the weather vane.

“Where and how did you lose it?” I asked, which was pretty much what we’d asked a man about his pit bull earlier in the day.

Martin proceeded to tell me every place he’d been that day and how the wedding band had fallen off while he was in the dairy section at Ballard Market before he went to produce, but he’d retrieved it and put it back on his finger.

Then he’d bought green onions at Sunset Hill Green Market because he’d forgotten them earlier.

He concluded with realizing in the shower that he didn’t have the gold band on the fourth finger of his left hand.

Then he told me about retracing his steps for two hours, and that he was heartbroken.

There was a sudden blast of bells from the midway section and my mother waving to me with two baskets of deep-fried vegetables. It’s just a ring, I wanted say, a round piece of gold, not something irreplaceable like the finger itself, but I could hear his distress as though he had negated the marriage itself.

You see, Martin has never been married before, and he has never before in his life worn a ring on either hand.

Rings weren’t exchanged at the ceremony at Sunset Hill Park. It wasn’t until July that there was time to look at estate wedding bands to match my ring.

We found a band at Coleman’s and then left it for sizing with George Smith, still doing business as Phil’s Jewelry upstairs in the Ballard Building.

A week later we met to pick up the ring together before I left for the east coast. George started to give the band to Martin, but with a belated sense of ceremony I said, “Maybe I should do that,” and put the ring on his finger.

George was saying, “It should be a little snug over the knuckle.”

In hindsight, I believe there was a flicker of concern that it slid on so easily, but then Martin tugged at it a bit and George said, “Should be fine.”

Hearing that it was Martin’s first time married, he presented him with a cigar.

I took a photograph of Martin’s hand to document the first time he’d ever worn a wedding ring, but they were blurry so I deleted them.

The next day he took me to the airport. It was just three days later that he called me with the news.

By the time that Martin joined me at my parent’s cottage two weeks later, everyone on the street would first greet him with congratulations and then ask, “Did you find the ring?”

For most of the time that I was on vacation, I believed that when we returned home I would find the ring beneath the piano or someplace obvious to me but invisible to Martin.

The night before our flight I finally asked Martin, “What do you really think happened to the ring?”

Then he told me about emptying the compost bin from the kitchen into the huge yard waste container and needing to rap it against the side to shake its contents loose. As a “lefty” he would have been rapping with the ring hand.

He went through the full contents of the yard waste twice, but he probably would have needed tweezers and a dissection tray to have found the gold band.

Since our return, I have not so much as looked under the piano. As far as I know, Martin still has the cigar.

Somewhere out in Washington state, there’s a band of gold in future compost. Someday, perhaps mixed in with bark or potting soil, the ring will surface in a garden bed or greenhouse, a treasure simply misplaced.

I don’t think losing the ring foretells the future of our marriage; it just means the ring has a different future - and perhaps explains the name of the leading brand of compost – Black Gold.