My mom and Mike actually used to live there at the shop--they had living quarters built onto the back and a fenced area for their pets.
They've been building a house out in the mountains for several years now, and the majority of their belongings are there at the new house now. But some things remained--in a storage trailer there at the boat yard. I remember my mom telling me she wanted me to have the cedar chest that she'd received when she was 18 years old and getting married to my dad. It had her wedding dress in it, and some items from our childhood. It also had my wedding dress from 1993 in it. A very very old dress, probably 70 years old by now. But since there were too many things in the way, we never got the cedar chest out.
That was the first thing I thought of while I was surveying the burned property on Monday morning. Was that storage trailer burned?
Yep.
I decided to get up in there and look around anyway. It was still very hot to the touch, the fire had only been put out a few hours before. And the temperature out there was 115 degrees.
Here's the inside of the trailer. Do YOU see a cedar chest?
I see something back in there that looks like a black coffin...
What is in the black coffin?
Looks like a wedding dress.
Yep, it survived. And so did my mom's dress, and all the photos and memorabilia in the bottom of the chest. The wood inside was untouched--the wood on the outside was completely burned. In fact, as I was trying to move the chest around to see if there was still some stuff readable on the outside (something I'd done in red crayon to it when I was four years old) the whole darn thing just disintegrated.
I took all the stuff home and laid out the papers and pictures to dry. Everything was soaking wet, and smelled like a combination of horrible smoke and wet cedar. The dresses dried out pretty quickly (because by the time I got home with them it was nearly 120 degrees out. The dresses smell, and have a little bit of soot on them, but otherwise they're fine. I don't know how they'll hold up at the dry cleaners, we'll see.
As for the shop, it's a total loss. There were several customers' boats destroyed as well. My mom and Mike are planning to rebuild and get back in business.
