NATCHEZ — Minnie Dinelli has a guardian angel, but she doesn’t know who it is.

Following a recent grocery shopping trip, Dinelli left her purse in her shopping cart. More than an hour passed before she realized the purse didn’t make it back in the car with her.

She dropped her groceries off for an elderly friend and visited for approximately an hour before heading home. Once she arrived home, Dinelli realized her purse was missing.

She retraced her steps and determined she must have left it at the grocery store.

Dinelli said she spent almost five hours that day canceling checks, replacing her driver’s license and checking and re-checking with the store to see if her purse had been found.

But it turns out Dinelli only needed to go home.

It turns out, someone spotted the purse and returned it to Dinelli’s house undisturbed.

“It was just sitting in a chair under my carport, when I came home,” she said. “I had gotten some cash from the bank and it was all in there. Everything was still in there.”

Everything but a note letting Dinelli know who went out of their way to make sure the purse was returned.

“It is just unbelievable that someone would have done that,” she said. “I checked at the store if someone had returned the purse there, but never thought someone would bring it to my house.”

Dinelli said she’s like the opportunity to say “thank you” to the person who did the good deed.

“I’d like to thank them because everything was in my purse, everything,” she said.

Dinelli, who taught school in the Natchez public school district for 35 years and tutored children in her home for 10 years after that said it could have been a friend or former student who returned the purse.

The only thing she knows for sure is that there is at least one good Samaritan in Natchez.

“My daughter kept telling me if a criminal found my purse, I’d never get it back, but if an honest person found my purse, I’d get it back,” she said. “The person who found my purse was an honest and kind person.”