‘Message from heaven’: Wedding plate lost during Hurricane Ian returned to owner months later

A delicate memory in the form of a porcelain wedding plate has been reunited with its owner months after Hurricane Ian destroyed nearly everything on Fort Meyers Beach last year.

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Gail Conner told WBBH, “When I looked at it, it was so beautiful because it’s a message from heaven.”

The plate was a wedding gift from her sister who was Conner’s maid of honor during her 1978 wedding. Conner’s sister was killed more than a decade later by a drunk driver, the Miami Herald reported.

Conner said that the storm scattered everything from her home and she was amazed that it landed miles away from her island home, intact.

Conner had her treasure returned to her thanks to a beach patrol officer who found it at the Bay Oaks Recreational Center about two miles from where Conner’s home once stood and posted about it on Facebook.

A friend of Conner’s saw the story that WBBH did on the plate, picked up the plate and then returned it to Conner, the Herald reported.

Conner plans on rebuilding her home on Fort Meyers Beach and said the plate, will be featured in that home once it’s done, WBBH reported.

Hurricane Ian made landfall in southwest Florida last September as a Category 4, before weakening to a tropical storm and strengthening again to a Category 1 storm, making a second landfall near Georgetown, South Carolina, according to the National Environmental Satellite Data and Information Service division of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

It was the strongest hurricane to slam into Florida since 2018′s Hurricane Michael and the first of that strength since Hurricane Charlie in 2004 to hit southwest Florida.