In what is sure to be a touching high school reunion of sorts, a woman from Maine will soon have her long-lost graduating class ring in hand, thanks to the help of one determined gas station attendant from Nova Scotia.

Johnny Ward found the engraved ring with a pinkish-red stone in the early 1990s, when he was cleaning a washroom at an Irving gas station in Glenholme, N.S. For years, Ward held onto the piece of jewellery in the hopes that someone would show up to claim it.

He even held onto the ring after the gas station shut down nearly 20 years ago, and tried to track down the ring’s owner with an investigation of his own.

The ring has the words “Brewer High School 1980” and the initials CAL etched into it, as well as a witch on one side. Ward never managed to get very far in his search, however, in large part because he doesn’t use computers.

Eventually, his girlfriend found the keepsake in his home and convinced him to renew his search for the ring’s rightful owner.

“I just kind of misplaced it,” Ward told CTV Atlantic on Tuesday. “Then my girlfriend, she found it and looked it over and said, ‘Maybe somebody would like to have that back.”

Ward’s girlfriend was correct because that somebody turned out to be Cathy Bradstreet who lives in Maine.

Bradstreet said she noticed a CTV News story about the missing class ring posted on her old high school’s class of 1980 Facebook page. The woman knew it was hers immediately because the ring featured her initials before she was married, CAL for Cathy Leclerc, as well as an engraved runner’s foot with a wing and an atomic particle because she wanted to be a nurse at the time.

“When I saw the picture of that and realized that it really was my ring, I was shocked,” Bradstreet said. “I have travelled through Nova Scotia, but I believed I did not have the ring with me at the time.”

Even though Bradstreet doesn’t know how her class ring ended up in Ward’s gas station in Colchester County, she’s grateful it did.

“I'm very touched by your compassionate heart and your girlfriend,” she told Ward over the phone. “I cannot tell you how much I appreciate this.”

Ward said he plans to mail the forgotten ring to Bradstreet in the next few days.

With a report from CTV Atlantic’s Dan MacIntosh