(Day 9) 'At least we're alive'

EDINBURG — Norma Reyna hasn’t purchased a Christmas present yet. And unless something drastic happens, she probably won’t.

Instead, she has spent the last two weeks frantically gathering donations and pooling her family’s meager funds to save the land it lives on from repossession. (Watch "The Reyna Family," a Monitor multimedia presentation)

“It’s very hard, actually harder than when our other trailer house caught on fire,” said Reyna, whose mortgage company set a Dec. 21 deadline for her family to come up with a $3,000 payment or be forced to give up the 1 1/2 acres of land on which their double-wide trailer home sits.

It’s the latest blow for a family that watched its previous trailer home burn one summer night three years ago, barely leaving them time to make sure their now 21-year-old son — severely mentally disabled since birth and also epileptic — and a young granddaughter from another child were safely out.

Since then, the Reyna family has struggled to improve its situation, heavily relying on the kindness of friends and family to make ends meet.

They rarely use electricity, because they simply can’t afford it, and they have often gone without food.

But one thing they have never lacked is the spirit to keep fighting and the ability to remember what’s most important.

“At least we’re alive,” Reyna said. “There are people who actually don’t have anything at all.”

The fire

Reyna, 47, was dreaming about her father when it happened.

He passed away Dec. 20, 2002, but his memory was still fresh in her mind that day in summer 2004, and the dream that night was so vivid she didn’t want to wake up — even after her husband, Reymundo, told her their house was on fire.

Reymundo, 50, had gotten up to use the bathroom early that Sunday. In a twist of good fortune, the bathroom closest to him wasn’t working. So he started down the hall toward the one at the other end of the trailer home he’d been improving for 10 years since the family purchased it.

As he sleepily crept toward the bathroom, he noticed he couldn’t see well. When he took a deep breath, he inhaled a lungful of black smoke. Now fully awake, he saw that an area inside the bathroom was on fire and smoke was rapidly filling the small home.

“My husband tells me, ‘Wake up, the trailer house is on fire,’” Norma said. “I said, ‘Get out of here. I’m going back to sleep,’ because it was 3:30 in the morning.”

The couple frantically rounded up their son, Anthony Perez, and granddaughter Jackie, then 4, and pushed their way out to safety through a screen window. Reymundo told his wife to run and not look back, but after escaping she couldn’t help herself.

She saw one end of the house completely burned. By the time they were able to completely extinguish the flames, black soot covered almost every smoke-damaged inch inside. Firefighters said an electrical short likely caused the fire.

“Watching my trailer house, after working all that time trying to pay it down and watching it just get burned up, that was something I’d never like to experience again,” Reymundo said.

They were pretty much left with just the clothes on their backs.

The ashes

Rebuilding their lives has been much like trying to be free of quicksand.

No matter how hard they try, it seems they cannot get back on their feet.

They just need that extra boost to a safe home.

After the fire, they moved in with one of Norma’s four grown children from a previous marriage.

After staying there for a short time, Reymundo, Norma and Anthony moved back onto the land in a tiny shed Reymundo had built for an older son when he first married.

No bigger than 12 feet long and 12 feet wide, the family set up their beds on opposite walls, practically living in each others’ laps for nearly three months.

“It was hard but we managed,” Reymundo said. “We’re always together — that’s the thing about it.”

With such cramped quarters, the family eventually ventured back inside their gutted trailer home, which was still on the property because they couldn’t afford to haul it away. They would sleep in one room on the side of the house that had only suffered smoke damage and spend the rest of their time in the shed.

After nearly six months under those conditions, Reymundo asked for and received another trailer home a friend was planning to tear down. The 25-year-old crumbling structure had served as a place to stay while hunting on the friend’s property in McCook.

“I knew it was going to need a lot of work on the inside and outside, but it’s better than the one I was working on, the burned one,” said Reymundo, still a proud father despite the circumstances his family struggles with every day. “Nobody wanted to stay there anymore.”

Reymundo borrowed a tractor to move the house in two pieces to their rural corner of northwest Edinburg. Having sat rarely used in the middle of the woods for years, the house had become a haven for raccoons.

More than just a nuisance, the animals had eaten and destroyed most of the insulation inside the thin walls, which are patched throughout the house with unpainted plywood and whatever else the family can find to cover the holes.

Areas of the ceiling where water leaks through on rainy nights are betrayed by ugly patches of mildew and rotten wood, and the house is actually colder inside than out on chilly nights — dire straits that drove Reymundo to build a fire inside the living area several times using an old rim from a truck as a fireplace.

Norma, however, doesn’t let him try that anymore.

“I kept thinking, ‘What if the house catches on fire again?’” she said.

Struggle to recovery

Norma said her son Anthony is a blessing to her. But the cost of keeping him from suffering further seizures — he has had epilepsy since elementary school — is great.

Anthony’s anti-seizure medicine alone costs $300 per month, an expense Medicaid just barely covers.

Anthony also receives a modest Social Security check every month, but he hasn’t been able to land a job since three years ago when he served as a volunteer firefighter at the Alton Fire Department, helping the other firefighters with basic errands and chores.

He graduated from Mission High School last year — but because of his disability has trouble speaking, which may be why he doesn’t receive callbacks after his job interviews.

“She’s got a little bit worried about it, paying off the land, so it’s tough,” Anthony said about his mother. “I wish I could help some more. That’s why I’m trying to look for another fire department, to ask them if I could help out. If they have less people I could help them out.”

Norma takes home roughly $1,000 per month working as a teacher’s aide at Olivero Garza Elementary in Sharyland, and Reymundo makes $8 an hour as a mechanic at Wal-Mart. Most of their money goes to their land payment and other bills. Norma would like to finish taking classes to become a nurse, but they can’t afford for her to go back to school.

Their home’s poor insulation wreaks havoc on their energy use, costing them as a much as $400 in monthly electric bills sometimes. Their bills were never that high before, and they find it even harder to make ends meet now as they continue struggling to recover.

The family has one running car, a beat-up white 1986 station wagon that they share to make their daily commutes to the city, though Norma often is left looking for a ride. Reymundo has another vehicle, an old van, but it needs a new engine, and even if it worked, he’s not sure he would be able to fill two tanks with the ever-increasing cost of gasoline.

Making matters worse, their mortgage company recently claimed the family was one year behind on their land payments. Norma was able to dig up money order receipts that proved they had been paying, but now the company says they weren’t paying enough and has given them until Dec. 21 to come up with the $3,000 difference or be forced off the property.

“It’s real hard, real hard,” said Reymundo, fighting back tears. “Sometimes it just feels like all the doors are closed and I’m just thinking, ‘What can I do? What can I do?’”

As of a week ago, Norma had managed to come up with $780 and several promises from friends and family to help with the rest.

But the uncertainty of her family’s future makes it hard to think much about Christmas.

Gifts, or even simple cards, are an afterthought now.

They just need that extra helping hand up.

____

Jason McDaniel is a sports reporter for The Monitor. You can reach him at (956) 683-4442.