Sowing the seeds of honesty.

In March, Gerald Parish of Spencer, Iowa, passed away at age 85. During the July 4th weekend, his three children (Jody Gardner of Omaha, Nebraska, and her two sisters from California) held a holiday party in his memory at the family home on Iowa's Lake Okoboji. More than 200 people attended the event.

A few days later, the sisters closed their father's bank accounts and signed the pertinent estate documents. Jody Gardner's share of the inheritance included $20,000 in cashier's checks and $1,000 in cash and coins, which she placed in her billfold.

On the trip back to the lake home, Gardner stopped in Milford to buy some groceries. She set the billfold on top of her van while placing the groceries in the vehicle, then forgot about it and drove off. "I can't believe I did it, but I did it," she told the July 25 Des Moines Register. In addition to the money, the billfold included such identifiers as her driver's license, insurance license (she is an agent), and six credit cards.

Later that day, Tim Titterington and his son Dylan, 16, were mowing Conservation Reserve Program land along a state highway near their farm outside Milford. Mr. Titterington told the Register, "We're just finishing up a farm south of West Okoboji. I took off down the road going home. A semi drove past, and it looked like confetti flying around. I got a little closer, and here's 20-dollar bills flying around, and receipts, and everything else." He also noticed a billfold lying in the road, about five miles from the Milford store where Gardner had stopped for groceries. "The cars and trucks were hitting it," he recalled. "It was busy, right around the holidays. Nobody was stopping. A semi would go by and blow everything into the air. Not a soul stopped to help."

Crawling on their hands and knees, Mr. Titterington and Dylan tried to retrieve the debris as cars and trucks whizzed by, "just going vroom, vroom, vroom. You know how it is. Like trying to change a tire in the middle of the interstate." It was, he says, "the Great American Scavenger Hunt."

In all, the Titteringtons spent about an hour tracking down the checks, cash and other items disgorged from the billfold. When they arrived home, Dylan rummaged through it all and came across a telephone number that put him in touch with one of Gardner's friends, who then gave Dylan directions to the family home.

When the Titteringtons arrived at Lake Okoboji, Dylan found Gardner on a dock behind the house. Only when asked if she had lost her billfold did she realize that she had done so. "I had no idea," she says.

The billfold was empty when Dylan handed it to her, so she momentarily assumed that someone had found it before the Titteringtons. "If you're stupid enough to leave your wallet on your van and it falls off, you expect somebody to steal everything," she told the Register, and "somebody could have."

Actually, however, the Titteringtons had placed the contents in a plastic cup. Mr. Titterington recalls that when they gave it to her, her mouth "just kind of fell open and she goes, 'My word.'"

If someone less honest had discovered the billfold, Gardner notes, it would not have been difficult to convert the cashier's checks to cash, especially since he or she would also have had the many items of identification. She describes it as "an absolute miracle for me. Those people are amazing."

For Mr. Titterington, the good deed was simply "the way we were brought up." As his son explained when queried by the Register, there was no question that he and his dad would try to find the owner. In fact, the notion of "finders keepers" never crossed their minds: "We're just not like that, I guess. My dad is a guy [who] likes to be honest, and he never does anything like that. We're just farmers out here, and we've got most everything we need. It's just not our thought to keep it." Mr. Titterington adds: "You know how it is. You want to treat people like you want to be treated yourself. Someday I might lose something, and I'd sure want somebody to return it to me."

As far as she could tell, Gardner did not lose so much as a piece of paper. The Titteringtons apparently found and returned everything. She offered them a $100 reward, but they would not take it. "They would not accept a doggone thing," she recalls. "I cried. I hugged them. To me, it was absolutely amazing. I just want these guys to get some thank-yous." Their display of integrity has, she says, restored her faith in humanity.

The experience also taught Gardner an important lesson. She now keeps her inheritance in the bank, not in her billfold.