WEST PARIS — No presents were required under Beth Coffin’s Christmas tree this year. A new house that the community built for her was all she and her family could have dreamed of.

“This year I didn’t think we needed anything,” Beth’s mother Bonnie Coffin said, as she and her daughter and partner Gary Waterhouse sat in the living room of their new house on Porter Street in West Paris recently. A Christmas tree decorated with large colorful bulbs and handmade ornaments stood in front of the big picture window.

Beth, 25, suffers from spinal muscular atrophy type II, two blood diseases and scoliosis that has left her wheelchair bound. Doctors said she would not live past the age of 2. Bonnie, who is her full-time caretaker, and Gary both have chronic Lyme disease. A year ago, their home, an old trailer with a stick-built addition, was literally falling apart around them.

The furnace had stopped working, water streamed from a leak in the living room ceiling, there was mold and rot in the kitchen floor, the bathtub was about to fall through soft floor planks. But Beth’s Porta-Lung — the cylinder-shaped bed where she had to sleep each night in a dark, tiny bedroom to keep her alive — was decorated with colorful, happy-face flower stickers. It sat next to a dark window lightened only by the brightly colored flower curtains Bonnie made.

But like the happy-face stickers, the home was filled with laughter and positivity.

When word about the family’s plight reached the public through a newspaper account, a group of area residents who had never met before got together and formed a committee to help out the family. They called the committee “Beth’s House Committee” and raised enough money to build Beth and her family a new house just down the road from their old one.

In September the family moved in.

Now peach frappe is the choice of color for Beth Coffin’s new bedroom.

“A lot of people were surprised I didn’t paint it purple,” Beth said of her favorite color, as she sat at the computer table where she spends most of her time when she and her mom aren’t watching “Desperate Housewives” or “Two and a Half Men.” “I do love the color purple, just not on my walls.”

Beth and her family moved three times during this past year to get to the new house, spending three months in a relatively small camper where there was only enough room for Beth’s Porta-Lung and two chairs in the living room. They were bursting at the seams to get into the new house.

The new house provides not only enough room for Beth’s wheelchair to move about easily, but a fully functional bathroom, which is important for her mom, who lifts Beth’s barely 50-pound body every night to slide her into the bed, and then wakes up almost every two hours to rub Beth’s stiffened joints.

Beth’s new room even has a window seat where the strong afternoon light comes in. The window seat has a twin-size mattress for friends who sleep over.

“Oh, you’re going to go out like a light,” Beth said she told a friend recently when she came to spend the night in the comfortable niche.

The house, which sits high on a hill overlooking a range of mountains including Mollyockett and Mt. Tom, is filled with laughter and a warmth that radiates well beyond the heat from the wood stove.

“It was well worth the effort,” Gary said. Despite his medical condition, he worked 10 to 12 hours a day on the house at the urging of Joe Bombaca of Norway, a 67-year-old retired builder and supervisor, and many others. The effort not only resulted in a new house, but provided Gary with a renewed physical energy from the chronic Lyme disease.

“I’m looking for a job logging,” he said of his desire to get back in the work force while his health allows it.

The family has begun to watch the stars in the expansive sky overhead. They’ve seen a space shuttle go across the sky and 30 wild turkeys strut across their front yard. There is wildlife all around them and plenty of room for their vegetable garden.

Beth decided this year she would string large blue Christmas bulbs across the front of the house and put big colorful bulbs on the Christmas tree they bought from Bert Rugg in Oxford to help support the His Place Teen Center.

“It’s really important to give back,” Bonnie said of supporting Rugg’s program, after Rugg’s program helped support the building of her home.

Another tree, which Gary cut down in the back of their nearly four-acre lot, sits in front of the house slightly leaning to the right from the strong wind that sweeps across the hill.

But it’s the Christmas tree in the living room that Beth has her eye on.

“It stays up until New Year’s,” Beth declared as she, Bonnie and Gary smiled.

ldixon@sunjournal.com

Editor’s note: There’s usually more to every story we do, and the end of the year is a natural time to update some of the more interesting and poignant stories of 2010. Today we look back at five stories we covered in 2010 and what has happened since. Tomorrow, updates on five more of the year’s most interesting stories.

Copy the Story Link