R is for Redemption
The text dinged on my husband’s phone. “Get home now!” our neighbor told us, “Your garage is on fire!
Turning around on the highway, our hearts sank when we saw the roiling cloud of black smoke nine miles away. My husband focused on driving safely while I screamed in horror with the realization of each precious thing we’d stored in the ‘Garage-Mahal’.
As my husband would write in a Facebook post the following day, “We keep telling ourselves, ‘we lost stuff, just stuff.’ Though it was all just stuff, it was part of our everyday lives, part of our past, and a path towards our future.
You see, my husband and I have strong passions, his for building customized recreational equipment like canoes, kayaks, skateboards, surfboards, and many other innovations fore enjoying the great outdoors. The downstairs of our 4-car garage was his busy workshop. My passion is collecting vintage clothing and their stories. (To give you an idea of the scale of my collections, I had over six hundred fifty pairs of vintage shoes, with a penchant for the unusual.) I loved using my collection for museum displays and presentations, classroom visits, and historical re-enactments. My vintage clothing and accoutrements filled the garage’s upstairs ‘extra room’.
Pulling up to the fire scene was surreal. The things we’d accrued in our passions were being consumed in a fireball that was taller than our 100-year old trees. The Fire Chief had called in four stations to battle the voracious flames that threatened to destroy our home and our neighbors’ homes. Our evacuated neighbors stared aghast in the yards across the street. Two of our neighbors held me tightly as I shuddered with weeping sobs.
After the blaze was put out, the fire inspector began searching for the cause of the fire. As he dug through the fire-hose sodden debris, the fire crew tossed scorched armfuls of my collection onto the yard. “Oh, you sweet dress,” I moaned as I recognized pieces of ruined 1800’s silk gowns. My husband found the charred bow of a canoe; the bow cap made from cherry wood from the orchard his great-grandfather had planted. The magnitude of our loss became real.
I felt so guilty when they carried out my father-in-law’s destroyed military uniform, recognizable only by the attached medals and buttons. I’d failed to protect/preserve this family heirloom. The gowns that my mother-in-law had modelled for a grand department store were not among the recovered remnants.
Stacked in the very last corner to be engulfed by flames were my dozens of beaded flapper gowns. As I spread each damaged dress out on the lawn, they looked like prisoners lined up at edge of a mass grave, waiting for the bullets to rain on them.
The insurance adjustor had me arrange my collection remnants into piles of ‘unsalvageable’, ‘possibly salvageable’, and ‘salvageable for parts only’. When the accounting was completed, he instructed us to throw all the ‘unsalvageable’ clothing on the pile of dumpster-bound charred debris. Seeing my fabulous burgundy silk 1850’s ball gown draped atop the wheelbarrow on its way to the dumpster reminded me of the ‘pink coat scene’ in Schindler’s List.
Ten days after the fire I took my scissors to the ‘salvageable for parts only’ pile, and began cutting off lace and beadwork from scorched gowns, gorilla fur from 1920’s coats, and buttons and medals from my father-in-law’s uniform.
As I cut off a pocket here, a badge there, a purpose started formulating in my mind. I’d create something for our grand-niece and nephews that would make the great-grandfather they’d never gotten to meet a tangible memory. Pockets and patches from his uniform was adorn a shoulder bag for our stylish grandniece. Medals from his uniform would adorn the backpacks I’d create from his suits for the grandnephews.My collection found redemption in soon-to-be created treasures of a long lost fighter pilot, to take permanent hold in the minds of his great grandchildren.
