The Update I Felt I Owed You All

Before anything else, thank you. What follows is the story of the home, the land, and the life your kindness has given us a chance to fight for.

We have raised enough to pay for Ezra’s MRI. I keep typing that sentence and then just sitting with it for a moment, because I don’t know how to fully explain what it means to me and our family.

When we hesitantly started this fundraiser, the most immediate fear in front of us was our baby’s body. It was the question his doctor wanted answered, the imaging that had been ordered and then denied, it was the cold, bureaucratic fact that while we were waiting for insurance to decide whether his MRI was necessary, we were also watching the days pass in the life of a baby who cannot tell us what he feels beneath his skin.

Because of you, that fear no longer has the same power over us, Ezra will get the care his doctor believes he needs. We are still working with his care team and the MRI facility, and we will keep updating you as we know more. But the terrible question of whether we could afford to find out what is happening inside our baby’s body has been answered by your kindness.

There is no perfect way to say thank you for that. So I will say it plainly: thank you, from the bottom of our hearts.

Now we are turning toward the other urgent thing standing in front of us, which thanks to the generosity of this amazing community, has gone from surviving a move to being able to say: “we are trying to save our children’s home.”

I want to explain clearly what we are trying to do, and why this place means so much to us. Because this is not just about a house, although it is a house. It’s not just about land, although the land matters more than I can say. It’s about the place where our family has survived, grown, healed, worked, failed, tried again, and become ourselves.

For the last five years, I worked in health care as a Clinical Quality and Compliance Specialist. It was meaningful work, but it was never high-paying work. My husband worked in a mill until he injured his back. He has now had two back surgeries that have kept him from returning to that line of work, and we have been waiting four years for his disability trial, which is finally coming up in July.

We are hopeful. But if the last few years have taught us anything, it is that hope and certainty are not the same thing, so we are trying not to count on anything before it actually happens.

During that same stretch of time, I was the only source of income for our family while also trying to go back to school. I took out student loans, and then I became very sick. I was sent from specialist to specialist and ended up losing 90 pounds from daily vomiting. School had to fall to the wayside. Between the student loans and some older credit card debt, my credit is not where it needs to be. My husband has decent credit, but because he does not currently have income, that does not get us where we need to be either. So that is the mountain we are trying to climb. The other obstacle is time.

The house is currently listed as cash only because our landlady’s realtor believes it may not be financeable due to foundation issues. But our realtor, who is one of the highest-rated agents in the area, believes there may still be a path to financing, even with those foundation concerns.

We know the house needs work, we have never pretended otherwise, but a little hard work won’t scare us away. We have already put years of labor into this place: new floors, new drywall, a new shower, repairs, projects, and more scraped knuckles and long weekends than I can probably remember. This is not a perfect house, it doesn’t even have enough bedrooms for all of our kids, but it is our home.

It is the house each one of our children came home to from the hospital after being born. It is where we carried them through the door as impossibly small newborns and tried to imagine the people they would become. It is where they learned to walk, where they have played and imagined and grown, where their childhood has taken shape in the ordinary holy ways childhood does: in messes, in laughter, in muddy shoes, in half-built forts, in bedtime resistance, in rooms full of drawings and crumbs and noise and life.

It is where we have built fairy gardens together, pulled endless briars and taught our children that loving a place means tending it. It’s where we have built playhouses, rock walls, and little structures for them to climb on, dream in, and remember. And this house has given something back to us, too.

After my husband injured his back and could no longer return to the kind of work he had always known, he became deeply depressed. In a lot of ways, he lost himself. Anyone who has watched someone they love lose not only work, but identity, purpose, routine, and the version of themselves they recognized, knows how painful that can be.

But working on this house and this land helped bring him back. Building the garden, teaching the kids, and repairing what needed to be repaired. Making this place safer and more beautiful and creating places for our children to play and learn and grow.

All of that gave him purpose again. It gave him a way to use his hands, his knowledge, his patience, and his love. It helped return the man I married to himself, and to us. So when I say this is more than a house, I mean that in every possible way.

This place has held our children, our memories, and our work. It’s held our grief and our healing, and it’s helped hold our family together.

And the land itself is rare. This is one of the last forested areas in downtown Coquille. It is not just dirt and trees to us. It’s our children’s safe place, it’s where they know the seasons, the mud, the animals, the quiet, the trees, and the kind of beauty that cannot simply be replaced somewhere else.

We have tended these woods for years. We have cleared paths, pulled briars, cared for the garden, watched the seasons move through the trees, and tried to teach our children that land is not just something you own or use, it is something you are responsible to.

Our kids have grown up finding frogs here. Watching birds. Noticing bugs. Learning where the moss grows and where the mud stays soft after rain. Once, they built a little house for caterpillars, the way children do when they still believe every small living thing deserves a home. And shockingly, the caterpillars actually stayed in it for weeks. That is the kind of childhood this place has given them.

And right now, saving this home also means trying to save those trees. The offers already on the house are from investors, and what we understand is that their plans would likely mean clearing the old-growth trees to make room for apartments or other development.

I know housing is needed, I know people need places to live, but I also know that once trees like these are gone, they are gone. You cannot rebuild old shade, you can’t replace the years it took for a forested place to become itself, you cannot clear-cut a living place and then act as if what was lost can be measured only in board feet or square footage or investment potential.

We want to save this land not only because we love it, but because nature deserves to keep existing here, too. Children deserve to grow up with trees and mud and birdsong and blackberry scratches. They deserve places that teach them they are part of something living, places where frogs can be found under leaves and caterpillars can be given houses and the world can still feel enchanted before it is priced, parceled, cleared, and sold. Our kids deserve that and other kids deserve that.

This town deserves to keep some of its quiet, green places before every last one of them is turned into profit. So yes, we are trying to save our home. But we are also trying to save the trees, the land, and one of the last little pockets of nature left in the middle of town.

And the truth is, we may only have a few days to get an offer in. That is the urgency we are living inside right now. We are trying to move quickly, gather what we need, talk to every person who might be able to help, and turn this narrow opening into a real offer before the chance is gone.

This is the place we imagined our future unfolding and we know saving it may still be a long shot. We know there are moving pieces we can’t fully control. But because of your kindness, we have gone from feeling like there was no path at all to having a real possibility in front of us. That is why we are continuing to fundraise.

From this point forward, donations will go toward the down payment, the debt payoff needed to make financing possible, and the immediate costs connected to trying to purchase and stabilize our home.

If, despite every effort, we are not able to buy this house, the funds will go toward securing stable housing for our children, moving costs, and keeping our family safe and housed through the transition. We are trying everything we can, we are talking to lenders, and we are working with our realtor. We are trying to move quickly while also making careful decisions, because we may only have a very small window to make an offer before the house and land are sold to someone else.

With everything this wonderful community of readers has done for us, I just wanted to take a moment to say:

Thank you for helping us get Ezra his MRI. Thank you for giving us the chance to fight for our children’s home. Thank you for seeing why this place matters to us. Thank you for understanding that a home is not only walls and a roof, and land is not only acreage, and trees are not only things standing in the way of development. Thank you for every donation, every share, every message, every prayer, every bit of advice, and every act of care. You have already changed what is possible for our family, and I need you to know that I am not writing this with the expectation that a single one of you will give more than you already have. You have already given us more than I knew how to hope for. I am posting because I want to tell you the story behind our home, because homes have stories, and this one has held nearly every chapter of our children’s lives.

We are so grateful. More than we can say.