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CAROL LOLLIS

Sylvia A. Hemminger's home on Main Street in Williamsburg.

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KRISTIN PALPINI

Sylvia A. Hemminger sits with cards and letters she received from area residents after they learned of her fight to save her Williamsburg home from foreclosure. Hemminger received enough money in donations to get current on her mortgage and stop a court proceeding.

WILLIAMSBURG - Support for Sylvia A. Hemminger, a single mother facing home foreclosure, started coming in from the Valley community almost as soon as her plight became known.

The day following an Aug. 26 Gazette article detailing Hemminger's struggle to make her mortgage payments, people from Williamsburg, Amherst, Easthampton, Pelham and Northampton began calling and sending anonymous donations to help her.

Hemminger received so much support from Valley residents that she was able to pay off her $7,700 arrears in full. The lender, Easthampton Savings Bank, dismissed foreclosure proceedings on Tuesday and reinstated her loan.

"I never thought anything like this would happen," said Hemminger, whose dining room table, once littered with late notices, is now covered with greeting cards and letters from strangers promising prayers and well wishes. Many of the cards contained anonymous donations.

Hemminger pulled a card featuring a fanciful nature scene from an envelope with no return address. Inside the card, someone wrote "Bless you," but left no name. There was a bank check for $300 in the card.

Another card contained a personal message from an Easthampton resident who had read Hemminger's story and had also "faced struggles in (her) life trying to make ends meet." She said she hoped a gift of $300 could help Hemminger, as well as buy some back-to-school supplies for her 12-year-old daughter.

A note on a piece of lined paper read "I fully open myself to all the financial abundance that can come to me." It was mailed to Hemminger along with a folded-up $10 bill.

"I was just blown away," Hemminger said. "I was so close to losing this, just everything. I'm so grateful."

In all, Hemminger received close to a dozen donations, mostly from people she had never met.

She also had more than 20 phone calls from people who wanted to voice their support and ask how they could help. A couple of lawyers phoned to provide free legal advice. Some people offered to stand with Hemminger at her foreclosure appearances in court. A few told Hemminger they called the bank to encourage leniency.

The local director of Kool Smiles, an organization that provides dental care to low-income families, called to inform Hemminger he was able to pull some strings and get her daughter an appointment with a Northampton dentist, Hemminger said.

Although all the gifts were a surprise to Hemminger, the most shocking came when she went to deposit some of the donations into her United Savings Bank account.

The account had been previously established to collect savings for her daughter, but Hemminger changed the name on the account to read "mortgage escrow," she said, in an effort to let people know she would not squander the donations she was receiving. She would be using them for her home. Before Hemminger's story appeared in the Gazette, there was $2.92 in the account. When she went to the bank on Friday to make a deposit, it contained more than $5,000.

"I thought (the teller) added too many zeros, but she laughed and said someone had made a large deposit," Hemminger said. Hemminger is working to repay much of the money to this donor with cash and her own labor. Hemminger worked out a schedule where she will do some cleaning for the donor on a regular basis.

"I am really so touched at how people have been so kind," Hemminger said. "I didn't expect this and now it's kind of hitting me."

For Hemminger, the effort to keep her home has been a difficult and emotional one.

"I came home the other day and started to cry," she said. "Our house looks awful right now, my lawn mower broke and my grass is so long, but I cried because I love my grass."

Hemminger has been fighting foreclosure of her Main Street home since March. The home, which she's owned for eight years, is worth about $164,000. Hemminger now owes about $78,000 on it.

Hemminger's financial troubles started in the spring of 2008 when she was laid off from her job at a Chesterfield manufacturing company. She went on unemployment for four weeks and worked a couple of temporary jobs, but money ran out in the fall when the jobs ended and Hemminger, because of that work, was not eligible to go back on unemployment insurance. She was unable to make her $677 a month mortgage payments.

Hemminger continued to look for work in the wake of the Wall Street meltdown, and this spring her financial situation improved.

In March she landed a minimum-wage, part-time job at the Franklin Hampshire Career Center in Northampton helping other people find jobs. In April she was hired for a temporary position collecting data for the U.S. Census and found freelance employment at Snack Taxi, a Plainfield company that sews reusable sandwich bags.

She was selling jewelry, furniture and musical instruments to make ends meet. Her daughter collected golf balls chipped off the golf course across the street and onto their front lawn, cleaned them up, and sold them to the course at 25 cents apiece to earn money to buy school clothes and go out with friends.

But Hemminger wasn't earning enough to pay the $1,500 per month necessary to offset the arrears and make her mortgage payment.

The bank filed for foreclosure in June. Unable to afford a lawyer, Hemminger represented herself in Hampshire Superior Court and continued to make payments when she could. In July, for example, she made four separate payments of $900, $800, $200 and $250.

"I was on autopilot then," said Hemminger, recalling the stress that accompanies home foreclosure. "Every day, it was just, `How am I going to pay? How am I going to pay?'"

Hemminger said it was frightening how close she came to being homeless. Driving through Northampton the other day, she saw a man sleeping on a bench, and the fear came rushing back.

"I felt bad for him and I thought, that could have been my daughter," she said, tearing up. "How would she have gone to school?"

Hemminger, who regularly volunteers with her daughter at the Amherst Survival Center's Thanksgiving feast, said she is already trying to give back to the community that has shown her so much generosity, even if it can only be in "small" ways.

When purchasing back-to-school supplies for her daughter, Hemminger bought a bag of red pens and an extra box of tissues, two items her daughter's school, Hampshire Regional Middle School, is requesting students have for the fall. She is donating them to the school to help students who may not be able to afford the supplies.

"It's really important that we do this even if we're just giving in a small way," Hemminger said. "If we don't give, why should other people?"

The community's outpouring of support "helps restore us, it gives us hope. I'm still going to be frugal," Hemminger said. "I just want to say a big, big, big thank-you to everyone from the bottom of our hearts. I'm going to hold on to this house."