After tragically losing some of her family’s most valuable belongings, Jane Fine Foster has now been reunited with some of the most precious ones thanks to a stroke of luck and the kindness of a stranger.
While out shopping in her hometown of Grand Junction, Colorado, Foster passed by the window of an antique store. She wasn’t looking to buy anything from the store, but there was a face in the window that caught her eye.
It was her mother’s.
Staring back at her from the window of A Robin’s Nest antique store was a photo of Foster’s mother on her wedding day in 1948.
Foster could not believe what she was seeing.
“To say I was shocked, stunned, near paralyzed is an understatement,” Foster told KKCO News. “I actually screamed out loud. … I just kept blinking and looking again, like, ‘Can that be? Of course, it can be. It was my mom.’”
Foster’s mother had passed away four years ago, but the series of wedding photos that she stumbled upon had been gone much longer.
About 12 years ago, after her father died, a lot of Foster’s family’s belongings were put into a storage unit in Arizona. Sadly, the photos, along with many of the family’s other irreplaceable items, were auctioned off after Foster’s mother missed a payment on the unit.
The storage company didn’t even tell the Fosters what had happened. It wasn’t until four months later that they learned they had lost their belongings. Foster had tried to recover the items with the most sentimental value, but a lot of her leads went cold and gave up hope.
That’s why she could barely believe her eyes when she saw the photos at the shop. How they made their way from Arizona to Colorado is still a mystery.
Foster was just happy finding the photos, but the shop’s owner, Shane Allerheiligen, had one more surprise for her.
In the basement of the shop, Allerheiligen had Foster’s mother’s wedding dress.
Now Foster was really stunned!
Allerheiligen brought up the dress, still in it’s original box and with a newspaper dated June 22, 1948–just two days after her parents’ wedding.
Foster knew she couldn’t risk losing the precious sentimental items again. She asked how much the dress would be, but the shop owner refused to take her money.
“There is no price,” he told Foster. “It’s made its way back to you. It’s home.”
We still can’t believe that after more than a decade, Foster has finally been reunited with the heirlooms she thought she would never see again.
While this is in great part due to an incredible stroke of luck and the kindness of strangers, Foster also believes her late mother played a role in the reunion.
“This is a message to us that she is still thinking about us,” she said, “and watching over us.”
