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 custom recreational equipment like canoes, kayaks, skateboards, and surfboards. 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 4-car upstairs, ‘extra room’.

Pulling up to the fire scene was surreal. All the things we’d accrued in following 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 and explosions that threatened to destroy our home and our neighbors’ homes. Our evacuated neighbors stared aghast from across the street. Two of them 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, his assistants carried out scorched armfuls of my collection, and laid them on the grass, “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 we’d built; the bow cap was cherry wood from the orchard his great-grandfather had planted. The magnitude of our loss began to feel 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 or preserve this family heirloom. The gowns that my mother-in-law had modelled for a grand department store were not among the recovered remnants.

Museum boxes holding my dozens of beaded flapper gowns had been stacked in the very back of the last corner that the flames engulfed. As I spread each damaged dress on the lawn for the insurance adjustor to catalog, they looked like prisoners standing on the 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. My 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 button here and a badge there, an idea began formulating in my mind. I’d create something for our grand-niece and nephews that would make the great-grandfather they never got to meet, a tangible memory to hold on to. Pockets and patches from his uniform would 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. I would create memorialized treasures of a long lost fighter pilot, to take permanent hold in the minds of his great grandchildren.