Treasures in the Ashes: Love letters from when David was in the Air Force

On the second day of the demolition of our house the man was able to get down to just 3 rooms. Our bedroom, my sewing room and the back bedroom were still standing. When they went to dump the trailer we went looking to see if there were any items in those rooms we needed to get. Stacy and David were bringing out a table from my sewing room and Stacy noticed that there was something that looked like a few letters under where they were walking. In this pic below you see that small white square on the bottom left? That is a stamp near the first few letters they found. Before she got too excited she showed them to David and he confirmed they were some of the letters we wrote back and forth while he was in the service. We were not sure where those were and were not sure if we had lost them in the fire or not yet. As we starting looking for more of them we saw that they were strewn all over the concrete. The large track hoe had made it very difficult for us to find the letters. It seems that when it was taking the house down it had found a pocket in the attic where the letters were.

Stacy and David had spent several days up in the attic digging for things that might not have been burned up. Everything that was in the attic was in large plastic bins and all of those were melted during the fire. When they did they formed a crust on top of everything under them. Stacy and David had to break through this crust and when they did they were able to find pockets of treasures. So it seems that these letters had been in a pocket that they were not able to get to because of the fallen roof.

Some friends of ours, Sallie and Roger, were visiting and when Stacy saw the letters Sallie and I started to search for the letters all over the slab. We found a lot of them and then we found some that were stuck under the claw of the large machine. Those we had to get after the men returned with the trailer and could lift the claw off the pile where the letters were.

While we were waiting we saw the Moma cat that had birthed Phoenix and his 2 siblings. She was crying and searching for her kittens. We were wanting to get those kittens out of the house before it was all destroyed. We thought we heard them and started the search. Stacy and David climbed up in the attic and didn't see them. Then we walked around the back of the house and heard them in the eaves. David started to tear them down so that they could get out. While we were in the back Stacy was inside the house and she was climbing on the counter tops to look for the kittens when she came upon a large amount of our letters to one another. They had fallen into our master bathroom. How fantastic! Below is a picture she took of our bathroom before she found the letters. Our love letters were beneath the heart shaped shelf!

She dug in the fallen insulation and found little stacks of letters and the stamps all thru out what had fallen from the attic! Most of them were wet and would need drying out.

Here are some pictures of the stacks she made while digging and how she found the letters:

I was so happy to have the letters that we had written while David was away in the Air Force for four years. I guess you could say some of our most personal feelings were in those letters and I was glad to have them to reread. We had both done a lot of growing up while he was away and I am so happy that after 6 years of dating we decided to make our life together.

When we got home that day I put as many of the letters as I could out to dry. We must have found at least 100 letters that we had written to one another. Fantastic!

  

- Sharon