Sometimes, a little good grows after cancer.
Like the curly hair Port Orchard resident Theresa Lyons now sports after losing her “long, stick straight hair” to the harsh chemotherapy and radiation treatments she endured over the past year to rid her body of breast cancer.
“It’s kind of cute,” Lyons said of her cropped dark hair, recalling the day she decided to shave her head instead of waiting for the rest of her hair to fall out. “I just locked myself in the bathroom and cried and cried. Now, I’m just happy to have hair again.”
Some good things are growing in her yard now, too, thanks to a work crew from the Windermere Real Estate Office in Port Orchard.
First thing Friday morning, about 20 volunteers showed up to mow, weed and plant flowers at Lyons’ house.
“We have a big back yard and it’s very hard to mow because you have to go uphill,” said Lyons, explaining that even in healthy times the yard is a difficult chore, but now that both she and her husband Kenneth are recovering — she from cancer treatments, he from emergency abdominal surgery — it became impossible. “We can’t mow, can’t lift anything — we are in no shape to do it.”
Which is why the Windermere staff stepped in.
“They came to our door and said to not take offense, but that every year they do a community project and they wanted to help us with our yard,” Lyons said.
Real estate agent Brie Storset said her office learned about the Lyons from the school counselor at Orchard Heights Elementary School, where Lyons’ twin girls, Violet and Azalea, both 10, attend.
“Both the parents have been unable to work for a while, so we wanted to see if we could relieve a burden,” Storset said, adding that several local businesses such as Scott Mclendon’s Ace Hardware, Fred Meyer and West Sound Landscaping donated items, as well. “Since the family can’t really go anywhere, we thought we would make the yard beautiful for them.”
“Oh my gosh — this is remarkable,” said Lyons Friday afternoon as the crew of volunteers began packing up. “We thought they were just going to do a little mowing and weeding.”
And they did mow the Lyons’ lawn — which volunteer Cyndi Wilson described as “three-feet high” — but continued on to landscape the front with bark and plant 30 types of plants, including an azalea bush.
“When they found out my girls are named after flowers (including Zinnia, 13), they said they wished they had known ahead of time so they could have planted all three kinds,” Lyons said with a laugh, adding that she was perfectly happy with whatever they planted. “It’s amazing what they did in just a few short hours.”
Steve Skibbs, who opened the Port Orchard office in 1991, said his staff has completed a community project — along with other Windermere offices — for the past 17 years.
“Normally, we help an organization and don’t usually do individuals, but this was a special case,” Skibbs said.
As for Lyons, the helping hands Friday may just have reaffirmed that her decision to move to Port Orchard from a suburb of Los Angeles two years ago was the right thing to do.
“Our life has been pretty rough the past year, with my being diagnosed with cancer last year, then going through the chemo and radiation,” Lyons said, explaining that nearly the same week that she received her last radiation treatment, her husband learned he would need emergency surgery to repair his intestines. “The hardest part, though, was that we left all our support system behind (in California). We didn’t know a soul here.”
A fact that made it all the more astounding to Lyons that so many souls were spending “their nice Friday afternoon” working on her yard. And she said the the gesture inspired her to think about how she can “pay the help forward.”
“I’ve been thinking about volunteering for the cancer helpline,” she said, explaining that when she was first diagnosed, she called the helpline regularly to try and make sense of what was happening to her. “What helped the most, more than anything the doctors told me, was talking to someone who had made it through. So maybe I can do that for someone else.”
