Help Local Artist Sherry Housley Recover - Hurricane Helene

Imagine for a moment,

You are in your seventies, living on your ancestral land. You’ve built an artists’ studio in the home you grew up in and hand built your own tiny home. Then Helene.

The waters of the creeks surrounding your property rise. You flee to your sisters’ home to ride out the storm, listening to boulders crashing down the stream outside your window, knowing that your home, your livelihood, your history and your legacy, are likely gone.

A few days later, you go home. And you realize the worst has happened. The tiny home you painstakingly built is just completely Gone. Your family home is ruined. There are FEET of silt in what used to be your yard, and buried beneath it are your belongings.

A stranger comes to help. Ends up taking a hatchet to your door to gain entry so you can truly assess the damage and see if anything is salvageable. And the strangers who start coming to help become a new kind of family, making sure you are warm, helping find a roof for over your head. They take your boxes of beads, so covered in dirt that it’s unidentifiable what is in each container, and those friends begin painstakingly cleaning them one by one.

Those strangers are still there now. Still with a metal detector. Still finding precious belongings under the silt. And then you get the letters.

Because you signed your property over to your child when you didn’t expect to survive the cancer, it’s no longer ‘yours’… and it isn’t your child’s primary residence. SO, you get Zero Help from FEMA. Oh and your home? That the neighbors’ 2x4s went straight through the under structure of? That trailers and rvs from further up river now lay haphazardly along the property line four months after Helene? It’s now a floodplain. You can’t just rebuild. You’re getting no help. There is no next step. Just a bunch of strangers. With metal detectors and resilience. And a group of friends who decided you matter. And your own hope.

This is Ms. Sherry’s story. Or at least a part of her story. She’s real. She matters. She is still helping others despite this being her reality. And she needs help.