Still rolling with this thought

At the risk of sounding totally random and confusing to those tenuously paying attention to what's going on here, a little vignette's been playing over and over again in my brain for nearly a week. It involves how I almost lost my wedding ring last week in a grocery store parking lot in western Iowa. Yup - the sucker flew off my cold ring finger and went flying as I grabbed for the door handle on my rental car.  Aside from the memorably odd physicality encapsulated in that moment - fumbling around on the ground trying to tease out how far the ring had flown given the sounds it made once it hit the pavement - a powerful metaphor is still just out of my grasp. Somewhere in this is the lesson of how a trip with one focused purpose can instead become another altogether different preoccupation. Maybe the point is how I drove around Iowa looking for one thing and ended up thinking about something related but altogether different. I'm really glad I found my ring. Now I can talk about it with a joke and a colorful vignette. Still, what if I'd left this meaningful piece of me behind there? Could I ever think of Sioux City as just another flyover spot on the American map? And what about others who lose something in just such a random place, with equal (or greater) unintended impact? Obviously, some thoughts roll on to points still unforeseen. I'll let y'all know when I figure out where it comes to rest.