Dear Mom and Dad,

I don't know if you'll ever read this. You're both busy people who work very hard, and don't always have much time for other things. Still, you do come here now and then, so perhaps you'll see this someday.

You know by now that the house has been rescued from foreclosure, and we're safely set up to begin our new payment plan. I've thanked you in words. Words seem so feeble sometimes.

Could we have done this without your help? Maybe. But only maybe. And it would have involved far greater anxiety and shock and despair than we were already in. What we were already in, that was bad enough.

Losing the house would have broken my heart. I would have lost my gardens, the plants and flowers and rocks, and all the love we've poured into our home. April and Babycat are buried here.

This is the only home I've ever owned in my entire life. Off in the distant future, if we're lucky and work hard, we may be able to buy more property. But none of it could ever replace this as my own true home.

Going back to living in rented apartments would have been terribly damaging to my health. There's only so much you can do to a place when you're only a tenant. Our modifications to the house have gone a long way toward making the improvement in function I've seen over the last several years. Simple acts like removing draperies and carpeting, altering the HVAC for allergy control, and especially cleaning the air of pollen and other allergens and particulates - those little things made a noticeable difference in my health, in my ability to do things. In my life.

In rented space, we could never control the air quality. Florida housing construction codes mean our air was always *shared* with other tenants. When they'd spray *air freshener* in their living quarters, our own HVAC system would draw that air into our apartment. Not to mention, if any previous residents of our space used ordinary scented cleaning products, it was impossible to eradicate the remains. Those remains made me quite ill.

You saved me from that fate.

You did so at some cost to yourselves.

I want to go back in the past and change what I did so it never happened at all. I can't do that.

All I can do is make sure I pay you back as soon as humanly possible - and get my act together a little better here so emergencies like that will not happen again.

As of yesterday afternoon - 10/15/07, when it was due - Walter's 2006 tax return was filed. If all goes well, the refund will repay 75% of your loan. We'll turn that over to you the instant it arrives, then get to work repaying the rest of what we borrowed.

Looking around my home with the fresh view one has after a long absence, I saw disorder and disarray that were probably perfectly obvious to everyone else all this time. I personally dislike having clutter and unfinished tasks around me. I think I understand better, now, how all that came to be. Deteriorating health played a large part; but of course, there's more to it than that. Revising my life to accommodate health issues is an ongoing project. Clearly, I need to pay more attention to addressing those old unfinished tasks, too.

So I am.

There's no other way I can think of to thank you by my actions.