‘When you’ve lost everything, finding something like that is the best thing in the world.’

Doug and Sandy Schultz, whose house was one of the 46 that burned to the ground in last week’s fire, held a party Sunday to put a formal end to its memory.

They called it a sifting party.

That is something akin to an archeological dig. A group of people wielding shovels, rakes, hand trowels and wide-mesh screens converge on a site where they sift through the rubble of history searching for objects that have meaning.

In this case, the rubble was the soggy ash of the Schultz’s house on Fay Drive and the history went back approximately 30 years to the time Doug and Sandy Schultz first began to save their memorabilia.

The diggers were about 20 friends, neighbors and members of the Schultz’s Seventh-Day Adventist church.

“We made a party of it to sort of give it closure,” said Doug Schultz, who wore a T-shirt, shorts and a Panama hat.

He was one of those who tried to save his house by standing on its metal shingle roof with a garden hose. When the situation became hopeless, he went inside to try to rescue some belongings.

He grabbed a tin box and some photos and then knew he had to run. He didn’t even try for the Renoir etching on the wall.

“I ran right by it,” he said.

It was hard to imagine that anything of value could rise from the ash he came back to Sunday. The only easily identifiable forms remaining on the lot were a flight of concrete steps and a flagstone fireplace.

So thorough was the incineration that a few oddly shaped pieces of metal were all that remained of a grand piano.

The work got under way at 9 a.m. with no great material expectations. Most of the early discoveries were small metal objects. Sandy Schultz laid them out on a sheet of plywood propped on the curb of her neighbor’s Tudor house whose green lawn and alabaster walls had not even been scorched in the fire.

In one corner she made a stack of flatware, crusted, bent and useless. In another she put half a dozen barely recognizable watches.

“This was my mother’s watch,” Sandy Schultz said. “And this was my nursing watch.”

Kitchen utensils, knickknacks, doorknobs and pieces of light fixtures piled up.

“Oh, this is Scott’s, uh . . . “ she couldn’t think of the word for her son’s barbell.

“When you’ve lost everything, finding something like that is the best thing in the whole world, “ Doug Schultz said. “It’s just like somebody gave you a wonderful gift.”

Schultz said that his wife had suffered more than her share of personal tragedy and that was one reason a sifting party was necessary.

“Basically, all she has left is the memories,” he said.

“Could this be my dad’s ring?” she asked, showing him a light metal object. It was too flimsy to be a ring.

A little later, Doug Schultz stood at the center of the ashes, raising something overhead.

“I found my glasses,” he shouted.

“Look right there,” his wife said. “Your wallet might be there. See, they’re in our bedroom area right now.”

The men took every find as a triumph.

A young man raised a ski binding to a cheer. Schultz paraded with the remnants of his personal computer--just a scrap of metal with a few holes in it.

Someone handed Sandy Schultz a loop of metal the color of pewter.

“You know what this is?” she asked, more from curiosity than emotion. “My good gold chain.”

Then the most astounding thing happened. An ash-smudged woman walked out of the house carrying a stack of soggy letters, most only charred around the edges.

Sandy Schultz carefully placed them on the street, sat down beside them and picked one off the stack.

“These are old letters,” she said. “They’ve got my maiden name on them. Doug, I found a letter from Merlin. He’s been dead for 23 years.”

She unfolded a sheet of lined paper.

“February 23, 1963,” she read, her voice rising in excitement. “Oh, this is great!”

She read aloud: “It’s Saturday night here and I’m not doing much, so I thought I’d write a letter to my favorite sister.”

She took another.

“Oh, good! These are letters from my mother. My mother’s dead, too,” her voice taking on an edge. “Everybody’s dead.”

She began to cry. Then another letter restored her smile.

“This is when my sister wrote me to tell me she had Suzie.”

Another stack of letters was brought down. Then a photo album that produced a packet of congratulation cards.

“That’s my graduation book,” Doug Schultz said.

In a few minutes, several perfectly legible issues of Auburn Academy’s newsletter “Rainier Echoes,” covering the 1960 graduation, were spread on the neighbor’s lawn to dry.

About noon, a potluck lunch was served.

It was a celebration of memories that rose from a residue of lost possessions on paper that was stronger than steel.

A quirk? A miracle? A sign?

If letters are still being written 30 years from now, would they survive the fire or melt with the computer?