I 

was in a witchy mood on Halloween. It 
was raining, and I was walking while 
listening to the Modern Love podcast 
when I saw something glittering in a puddle. 
It was an engagement ring.
A sad Titanic, its stone was half-sunken in 
mud and pointed up like the bow of a ship. 
Instead of a single, perfect circle, the gold 
band had an arm split off that held the gem 
in its claws. I rescued it from the water in 
hopes it held a story.
I brought it to Noodles & Company to 
take a better look and ordered a drink. The 
cashier hesitated. “I know you just got a 
drink, but I still have to put in a name for the 
order. Got a fake name?”
I said, “Witch.”
She 
laughed. 
“OK, 
Witch, 
happy 
Halloween.” Then, she winked.
Or maybe I’m just including the wink to 
make this story sound more witchy. Over the 
past year, a lot of people have told me I have 
a “witchy vibe,” and I’ve secretly liked this 
new identity — it’s special, supernatural and 
makes my strange stories seem like more 
than just coincidences.
I do have a lot of witchy stories. An artist 
once approached me in a Trader Joe’s 
parking lot and gave me a photo identical 
to one my cousin showed me that morning. 
My clock stopped the moment my great-
grandmother passed away. My grandfather 
opened his eyes in the hospital when I touched 
him. I experienced a one-person hail storm on a 
mountain in Santa Fe. While telling these stories to 
a friend, the petals on a flower behind me fell to the 
ground. 
I was convinced this ring was just another witchy 
thing that happened to me — and I needed to know 
the story. 
I posted an ad in the Ladies of UofM Facebook 
group and plenty of people commented telling me to 
turn it in to the police. I became more defensive with 
every comment — I didn’t trust the police to get the 
ring back to the owner. I felt eerily attached to it, like 
I owed something to the ring.
I wore the ring for the rest of the night.
T

he next day, I received a message from 
someone named Carey. We had no mutual 
friends. 
“Hi Hannah!” her message read. “I lost my mom’s 
ring 2 days ago and was wondering if you found it? It’s 
a simple design with a white sapphire. I’m looking to 
see if I have a pic of it somewhere!”
I sent the photo before she could describe it to me. 
Within minutes, Carey confirmed the ring was hers 
and insisted on bringing me a gift. Instead, I asked her 
to bring me the story. 
We met a few days later, and she told me the ring’s 
saga. In 1985, her father visited India from the U.S. 
to see his family, and while he was there, he was 
introduced to over 25 women to marry. He fell for 
Carey’s mother and sent her love poems for a year, 
including the ring in his final poem to propose.
Carey’s mother came to the U.S. the following 

year. Since then, Carey’s father has bought her 
mother plenty of rings, so she no longer wears the 
one I found.
The two of us exchanged more stories and ended 
up talking for two hours — I learned Carey is also a 
writer, and we discussed our hopes to make systemic 
change through journalism. We decided to meet 
again and continued messaging on Facebook.
I asked Carey to tell me more about her mother 
later that week. She responded that her mother is a 
witch; apparently, the woman has flat-lined twice and 
her blood sugar is regularly at a level that would kill 
a normal person. Carey needed some of her mother’s 
luck for an important meeting and borrowed the ring 
without asking permission. In the end, she never got 
to use its magic. The ring was lost by the time she 
arrived.
W

hile writing this piece, I wanted it so badly 
to prove that witches are real, that I’m a 
witch, that Carey’s mother is a witch, and 
why not Carey, too? I told the story to my partner, and 
he simply responded, “Writers are witches.”
Then it hit me: He’s right. I’m not a witch, I’m a 
writer. Not only that, this is a Modern Love column 
and I’m a modern love writer, which means I know 
there are stories happening all the time — we just 
need to ask ourselves the right questions. Instead of 
turning in the ring to the police, or keeping it, or even 
accepting whatever coffee or dinner Carey wanted to 
give me as a reward, I asked about her story because I 
knew there was one.
I figured it was the work of mysterious magic 
that Carey and I had met and held many of the same 

thoughts on systemic issues and activism. Our nearly-
two-hour discussion touched on ideas also covered by 
adrienne marie brown, a self-proclaimed witch and 
Detroit writer whose theory of “emergent strategy” 
shows how small systems incite larger-scale change. 
In other words, if more people found connections 
like how Carey and I found each other, these tiny 
interactions will multiply to create a larger movement.
brown cites fractals in this argument, which are 
small, repeated patterns that create larger systems 
(think the designs of snowflakes or seashells). Fractals 
appear in math, too, with the “magical” Fibonacci 
Sequence where each number is the sum of the two 
numbers before it. When squares are created using 
these numbers as the base and height, they stack on 
top of each other perfectly to create a symbol called 
the Golden Ratio.
You may have seen the Golden Ratio before — it 
looks like a spiral, or a shell opening up. It also sort of 
looks like Carey’s mother’s gold ring, with the stone 
being held on an arm separate from the band.
But then again, maybe that’s just me prescribing 
witchiness to the situation.
I’m not sure why I was the person who picked up 
Carey’s ring after it had been lying in a puddle for 
almost two days. Part of me wants to think there’s a 
reason we were meant to meet and connect, to discuss 
systems of change when we were engaging in them all 
along. Another part of me believes these stories could 
happen a lot more if we knew where to look. Maybe 
it’s witchcraft, or maybe it’s part of a larger pattern. 
Maybe it’s even love.
Or maybe those are all the same thing.

3B

Wednesday, November 20, 2019 // The Statement 3B

BY HANNAH BRAUER, STATEMENT COLUMNIST

Modern Love: I think you found 
my mother’s ring

ILLUSTRATION BY JONATHAN WALSH

