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This house is already a home and much more
© St. Petersburg Times If the sun was really rising Saturday over the sandy lot in the tiny subdivision just south of Homosassa, it was hard to tell. It was one of those last-gasp-of-winter mornings when the sand crunches like snow, the wind tries to whistle down your collar and the best place to be is somewhere inside where you can glimpse the gloomy beginnings of the day through the steam rising from a hot cup of coffee. But it was Elaine Coursen's day. She had earned it in more than one way. She wasn't going to miss the beginning of it. The sun, somewhere behind the clouds, was rising, and also rising, in a few minutes, would be the walls of a Habitat for Humanity house for Coursen and her three grandchildren. So she stood there, using a cane for support, trying to keep the emotion of her words from weakening her tenuous grasp on victory over the brain-stem stroke that left her disabled in 2001, the effort reddening her throat and making the scar from an earlier cancer operation -- which took place just about the time the family had to flee South Florida because of Hurricane Andrew -- more prominent. "If I cry, I won't be able to talk," she apologized to the the gathering of sweatered, jacketed friends shifting from one foot to the other. She made it through a brief Biblical passage, and, after a few brief words from Habitat for Humanity officials and a prayer by pastor Mark Whittaker, a concert of hammering announced that four walls would soon enclose the 1,066-square-foot slab that will be a home for Coursen's family by Easter weekend. There aren't many things for which I would get out of bed on a cold morning early enough to drive from Dade City to Homosassa, and despite that I am well aware of all of the good that Habitat for Humanity has done on the North Suncoast (16 new homes built in Citrus County alone in 10 years) and across the country, I probably would have skipped this one. But it was hard to ignore the description of Coursen's spirit provided to me by a friend of hers. Despite her stroke and the cancer, and despite that she has diabetes, the disabled 55-year-old nursing assistant and mother of five adult children has been raising her three teenage grandchildren -- Mark, Stephanie and Courtney Clark -- while living in a rented apartment. And despite the financial hardship imposed by her illness, she has been waiting and working patiently, logging in nearly twice the required 500 hours of "sweat equity" Habitat home recipients are required to provide en route to getting low-cost, but not free, housing. Moving into her own home and making payments on an interest-free 20-year-mortgage, with the payments going to help build other houses for others in need in the same county, will reduce her monthly housing costs by well over half -- an obvious boost. And what caught my attention was that work on Coursen's house should have been winding up this week, not beginning. Physical limitations notwithstanding, she had given up her place in line to a young mother who, Coursen determined, was in greater need. That house was in its finishing stages Saturday as work began on Coursen's. "It was a more immediate situation," was all she would say about the needs of the young mother, who, with her children, will soon move into what would have been Coursen's house. "We could wait a little longer." And then I met Coursen's grandchildren -- the kind of polite, smiling, clear-eyed kids who could be whining about their lot in life and, instead, are pitching in and thrilled with the prospect of being able to pick what color the walls in their new bedrooms would be. I realized that, cliche or not, it is true what people say about love being the difference between a house and home, and I realized as I left the site and headed home, that the day didn't seem quite as cold. Post script: I learned on Monday that Coursen fell at the building site shortly after I left. I also learned that she got up and -- mentioning but not complaining about a little soreness -- was right back at it. I wasn't surprised.
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