Rebuilding Lives--One Home at a Time
The tiny cabin, nestled like a pebble in the mountain’s palm, remains in cool morning shadow. Helen Spencer-Braden, 68, is cleaning, inside and out, preparing for the arrival of spring.
It has been a long, cold winter in the San Bernardino Mountains, and Spencer-Braden is recovering from pneumonia. It has not been easy to stay warm, she says, with only a fireplace, a small electric heater and her oven.
She and the cabin, which has fallen into disrepair, are about the same age, and sometimes she, too, feels like the paint is peeling away from her bones; the roof is leaking; her life--like the land surrounding her home--is in disarray. And, inside her soul, chill winds from the past sometimes seize her.
She is warmed by faith and, today, goodwill casts another log onto the fire. She will be visited by Rebuilding Together, a national nonprofit organization, founded in 1988 and which each year sponsors Christmas in April. The program combines local volunteers and donations to repair homes of the elderly, disabled or families in need on the last Saturday of the month. Spencer-Braden’s home is one of 7,800 across the country being repaired this year. To qualify, recipients must own their homes and apply for the program.
Spencer-Braden lives on Social Security, meager earnings from a part-time job at an art gallery and sales of her own graphic art. She has been here seven years, and although she has lived in fine houses in Malibu, Brentwood and South Pasadena, this is the first time she has owned a place on her own.
She loves this cabin, despite its significant shortcomings--the way she can lie in bed, a book folded on her chest, and look out upon the tops of trees, and beyond them, the stars. There are winter nights when the moon lights up the glen, casting shadows upon new fallen snow, and she stays awake as long as she can, absorbing the silent wonder of it all.
Her life has been a series of disparate chapters. She was born in a Little Rock orphanage because natal care was not provided for unmarried women in the small Texas town where her mother lived.
From the time she was young, Spencer-Braden made a habit of running away. Eventually, she settled on the West Coast, where in the early 1950s she worked at a bank and sang in nightclubs including San Francisco’s Hungry i, a place of rising stars like Lenny Bruce, Barbra Streisand and Phyllis Diller.
From singing, she moved into modeling. She appeared on album jackets, billboards and television commercials. In 1959, she was photographed by Gordon Parks in a Life magazine fashion spread, shot at the San Diego Zoo.
She was a restaurant owner, a drug addict, a wife four times, mother of two sons--one of whom was placed in foster care as a teenager, the other killed in a construction accident in 1989. The down payment for the cabin was made with settlement money from his death. Bradford had told her that someday he was going to buy her a home--and in the most tragic way, he did.
His ashes are nearby, and Spencer-Braden can walk to pay visit. When she first moved here, she planted a cedar in his honor, and each morning, she opens her bedroom window, looks out at it and “breathes in the beginning of the day.”
The morning air remains cool this time of year. Two blue-orange flames on her propane kitchen range provide modest heat as Spencer-Braden pulls nails out of her kitchen walls. She wants to make sure they are not lost when painters begin work. They are old, she says, but they are fine nails.
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By 8:20 a.m. on a Saturday morning, about 30 volunteers descend on her property in Cedar Glen with rakes, shovels, paint brushes, hammers and open hearts. In all, more than 300 people in the mountain communities will help repair 17 homes.
They arrive in a caravan of cars, pickups, SUVs and minivans, which they park along the dirt road leading to Spencer-Braden’s home. Work begins quickly. Rakes bite into a thick coat of pine needles and fallen leaves and branches. The area around the house is cleared so painting can commence. A propane heater was delivered the day before, attached to a wall and will be connected by a plumber.
A financial advisor, physical therapist, nurse, retired aerospace engineer, Girl Scouts, Boy Scouts, librarians, a chimney sweep and a woman visiting friends from Colorado are assigned tasks by a volunteer general contractor.
Spencer-Braden watches nervously, concerned that kindling or anything of potential value or worth might be carted off as junk. It can be difficult for outsiders to recognize important pieces of her life, scattered among the debris.
“My rocks,” she says, looking down at the base of a live oak tree, which serves as a canopy outside her front door. She has collected them on her journeys over the years and placed them beneath the tree.
“They’re right there,” says Phil Wolloch, who is installing brick tiles between the house and a storage shed, replacing thin, rotting sheets of plywood. “I piled them up for you.” She sighs with relief.
Parts of the house have not been painted for 30 years. This may be the first time the kitchen has ever been repainted. The wood bin and storage shed also are repaired. The deck is stripped and refinished. Santa Claus arrives in a convertible with a basket of goodies.
The focus of Christmas in April, says Jeff Callaway, a middle-school algebra teacher who heads the local effort, is twofold. Repairing homes of people in need is part of it, but also there is the experience of people working together--the drawing in of community.
Spray guns could have been used to paint Spencer-Braden’s house, but Callaway said that would be too easy, too fast. Brushes, he said, would make the experience more meaningful to participants.
“People say that if I had my way, 40 people with 1-inch brushes would be painting the house,” says Callaway, “and they’re right.”
So, one stroke at a time, the faded cabin takes on a sassy red demeanor. There is a feeling of rebirth, Spencer-Braden says. As in her own life, there is a sense of the old and tired becoming strong and vital once again.
Since moving to the mountains, she has started singing once again as a volunteer at a local nursing care facility, where she plays the piano and sings the old songs--”Don’t Get Around Much Anymore,” “Memories” and, for a woman named Dorothy, “Somewhere the Sun Is Shining,” the song played at her husband’s funeral.
She reads and listens to Miles Davis, the London Symphony, John Coltrane and the tumbling waters of Hook Creek. Her son, Rhett Marler, 39, of Santa Monica, visits from time to time, and they sit on the deck, beneath the live oak, or next to the cedar named for his brother. An artist, Rhett’s paintings fill Spencer-Braden’s walls.
It has taken her many years to finally find her way home, she says. As she watches the ongoing work taking place around her, she says she is overwhelmed by the kindness and generosity, the peace and renewal that arrives like spring in the palm of the mountain.