Things Are Getting Better

If you ask Pauline how she's doing, there's a good chance she'll tell you what she tells everyone: "Things are getting better."

Then you remember what her life holds.

Pauline is a single mother to two grown children with disabilities who depend on her completely. Every day, every need, every task, it all comes back to her. She is also a cancer survivor. She has faced more than most of us could carry, and she carries it day after day, with no end date and no break in sight. And still, she looks at the world around her and says, with total confidence, that things are getting better.

She isn't pretending. She isn't naive. She simply sees no reason to wallow in hopelessness, not when God has made her a promise that lasts forever. That isn't a slogan she saves for the good days. It's the ground she stands on, and it holds.

We met Pauline during that first Summer Project, while we were cleaning up her block. She was so grateful for our help, and you could feel it in the way she spoke to us. Her porch needed repair, and she had a need many families on the Hill know well: she had the money for the supplies, but not the labor.

So we connected her with one of our volunteers, who donated the labor to fix her porch.

It might sound like a small thing. A few boards, some repairs, a volunteer with a free weekend. But on the Hill, a porch is a very big deal.

People sit on their porches here. It's where neighbors wave as they walk by, where kids get watched over, where conversations start. When people are out on their porches, there are more eyes on the block, and the street grows safer. Community happens on the porch. Connection happens on the porch.

For Pauline, it meant all of that, and more. It meant a place to sit outside. A place to breathe. For a woman whose days are built around caring for others, it was a moment of reprieve from a hard life that had handed her far more than her share.

Here's what we learned from her that day, and we've never forgotten it. Pauline didn't want a handout. She wasn't looking for someone to swoop in and fix things for her. She was willing to ask for help, and she put her own money in too. She wanted to be a partner in it, not a project. She brought what she had to the table, and she trusted us to bring the rest.

That porch became the first of almost thirty we have repaired over the years.

Every summer, we keep going, repairing porches for other families, inspired by Pauline's story. Almost thirty families have gotten to sit on a restored porch, a little piece of peace right outside their own front door. Almost thirty places where neighbors can see each other, where a block can start to feel like a block again, all because one woman was brave enough to ask for help and strong enough to give what she could. She never set out to start anything. Her need gave birth to a program, and her willingness to ask opened a door that dozens of families have walked through since.

She taught us resilience. Not the kind you read about, but the kind you watch someone live out, quietly, every single day.

And the relationship hasn't stopped at the porch. Over the years, Pauline will reach out when she needs a ride or just a helping hand, and we are always happy to help. It goes both ways, the way real friendship does. We thought we were showing up for her. It turns out she was showing us what it looks like to hope when everything around you says not to.

She is a gem, one of those people who make a neighborhood worth fighting for.

So the next time someone tells us the Hill is hopeless, or that it's too hard, or that nothing ever really changes, we think of Pauline on her porch, with everything she carries and everything she believes. We think of the almost thirty porches that came after hers. And we think of her answer to every hard question life has asked her.

Things are getting better. Almost thirty porches later, we can't argue with her.