MONSON – A local woman counted her blessings Saturday when someone returned her wallet with its meager contents intact.

“I said my prayers this morning and they were answered,” the wallet’s owner, Mari-Ellen Hansen, said Saturday.

The few dollars that were in Hansen’s wallet Friday were all the unemployed woman had left after buying groceries for her family. Hansen’s husband, Greg, has been ill and unable to work. A benefit supper held recently in Monson for the couple helped defray his medical expenses.

Hansen said she became frantic when she discovered on her way home that she had forgotten her wallet, which she had placed on the truck in Guilford while putting groceries in her vehicle. She returned to the store and searched the parking lot and the roadsides for the wallet, to no avail.

Not expecting to see her wallet again, Hansen canceled the credit and debit cards that were inside the wallet and tried to put the loss behind her.

That was until Fred Brawn, a dispatcher at the Piscataquis County Sheriff’s Department in Dover-Foxcroft, reported Saturday that a man had returned Hansen’s wallet. The man, who had a speech impediment, left without giving his name to police.

“I’m very grateful for his honesty and may God bless him,” Hansen said.