Moriah speaking on the loss of her family’s cabin in the lower north fork fire.

“Hearing that it was completely gone and there was nothing left was pretty devastating, especially for my mom because It was my grandparents cabin and they spent every weekend up there as much as they could when she was growing up, so it felt like her childhood home. All of the things our grandparents had wanted to pass on to us when they moved, they left up there, and everything from my parent’s childhood, we just kept it up there because we didn’t have room for it at our house. It was this place that held all of our memories and then they were just gone. All of my childhood pictures were up there, so for every person involved something that meant a deep part of you was just gone… It took a really long time for my family to, I don’t want to say be ok with it, but just to accept it I guess. Because for a long time until we were up there searching through ashes it didn’t feel really and even then it was still kind of not real… Now we have rebuilt the cabin… That was an exciting process because even though we had lost so much we got to make something new out of it… Even though we lost a lot of our memorabilia items we still have the place and a new cabin and we still have the community around us that has been through the same thing and I think the community has gotten a lot closer.”

Mariah Murray