Season of Sharing helps Venice family enduring car repairs and a broken AC
Well before this year’s floods and high winds, Mary Bett Hockensmith’s life was impacted by fire.
Late one night in November 2017, the 25-year-old started getting frantic text messages from Aaron Stahl.
She had become friends with him the year before when Aaron, a family friend, had thrown a party at his house in Venice for the Fourth of July.
Now, the text messages included photos of that same house fully engulfed in flames.
Mary Bett stared in horror at her phone, feeling helpless in her home state of Kentucky, where she had fled from Florida with her husband and two small children ahead of Hurricane Irma.
“I’m beside myself,” she recalled of that night. “I was heartsick for my friend.”
Mary Bett remained awake with worry long after she was assured that Aaron got his daughter, roommates and pets out of the house to safety. There was no way for her to know, however, that her fate, too, would someday be wrapped up in the fallout from that fire.
One thing was clearer than ever: how much Aaron meant to her.
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A breathtaking reunion
It seemed everyone adored Aaron: his daughter, other people’s kids, Mary Bett’s own parents.
At that party for the Fourth, her mother, a lawyer – and a hard one to impress – had been instantly charmed. So was her father, a pharmaceutical rep.
Aaron was an art professor with commissioned paintings under his belt, but he had also worked in everything from plumbing to house framing – a general “jack of all trades,” as Mary Bett saw it.
But mostly it was his kindness and humor that clinched the deal.
“I knew from day one when I met him that I wanted him in my life in any capacity,” Mary Bett recalled.
In Kentucky after Irma, Mary Bett’s problematic marriage unraveled even more. She decided to return to Florida and her parents, who had long supported her, despite their wanting a different life for her than the difficult one she had chosen with her husband in her rebellious youth. Her husband soon left for good.
Back in the area in 2018 and about to be divorced, Mary Bett called Aaron, who was by now single.
They agreed to meet in front of his old house, the one that burned down. He was staying nearby in a rental.
Driving there, Mary Bett couldn’t ignore the intensity of her feelings.
“It was breathtaking,” she said. “I was shaking like a leaf to see him.”
In the months ahead, the two dated as Aaron worked with contractors to rebuild the house, drawing up the blueprints himself.
Meanwhile, Mary Bett started her life anew. She began looking for an apartment and was certified as a personal trainer. Aaron encouraged her independence, teaching her how to change the oil in her car.
No one seemed happier than Mary Bett’s mother, watching her daughter treated with deep affection and respect.
With Mary Bett’s mother declining from cancer in 2021, Mary Bett and Aaron, by then engaged, sped up the timing of a wedding so her mother could see the photos.
“She loved Aaron,” Mary Bett recalled of her mom. “She couldn’t talk much in the last days. The look on her face as she was looking at him. She just kept repeating, ‘Thank you.’”
As she grieved her mom’s passing, Mary Bett joined her family with Aaron’s in his nearly complete 2,300-square-foot home, including Aaron’s teenage daughter Winter and Mary Bett’s two children – Kamdyn and Jameson, both of whom Aaron adopted.
Mindful of their insurance limit, the couple checked regularly with the contractor about cost overruns and delays.
Every time, Mary Bett heard back the same reply. “We’re good. We’re good.”
Until the day the couple got the bill – and discovered they were anything but.
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Everything at once
They owed $112,000, according to the statement from the contractor.
Through 2022, as Mary Bett became pregnant, they fought the contractor in court. Eventually, the case was settled and the amount was reduced to $45,000.
By then the family’s finances were spiraling.
Mary Bett developed pancreatitis during the pregnancy and had to be hospitalized for three weeks.
Their baby, Sol, was born in early 2023 and stopped breathing five times, needing to remain in the ICU.
To tighten their budget, the couple tackled projects around the house themselves. Aaron did all their repairs while Mary Bett grew food in the garden.
Mary Bett considered going back to work as Sol became a toddler, but childcare prices killed that idea.
“It would be so insane,” she said. “The cost of childcare would essentially be the same as my paycheck.”
In early 2024, the contractor filed a $45,000 lien on the house and tried to seize it at auction.
Their savings gone, the couple filed for bankruptcy in April to save the house and arranged monthly payments on the settlement.
Aaron was working 60 hours a week at his flooring job just to keep up, but the family was barely getting by.
Then the air conditioner stopped working. So did the septic system. And both of their cars.
“We had all these problems all at once,” said Mary Bett.
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Sweet relief
This past summer Mary Bett dialed every agency she could find to seek help.
While her car had blown a gasket, the brakes on Aaron’s vehicle had worn out. Every day Mary Bett was on edge until he got safely home.
As a new school year came around, there was no money left over to buy the kids new shoes.
“Everything in my life is broken,” Mary Bett recalled crying and laughing at the same time while on the phone with an agency. “Somebody help us.”
Finally, she reached a case manager at St. Vincent de Paul – Epiphany Cathedral and Our Lady of Lourdes, in Venice, which covered part of the cost of fixing the AC.
But there was more. Unknown to Mary Bett, a fund existed to help families in emergencies with housing, childcare or car repairs, she learned from the woman.
Season of Sharing paid almost $700 to fix Aaron’s brakes.
“It was just sweet relief,” she said. “I think my jaw hit the floor when she told me Season of Sharing could help us.”
Pat Shehorn, a vice president at St. Vincent de Paul in Venice, said there are so many working families like the Stahls living paycheck to paycheck amid high costs of living.
“The smallest thing that can happen – your battery dies, your tires are bare, your AC goes, you’re getting hassled for rent because you missed work for a week because of the hurricane – you just can’t make it,” Shehorn said.
Season of Sharing is a “lifeline,” she added, that allows her agency’s help and resources to stretch that much further.
“It’s a community working to help the community,” she said.
Since receiving that help, Mary Bett and Aaron have started to get back on track.
The oldest daughter, Winter, has gone off to college and the couple is thinking far ahead to the day they will downsize and be debt-free.
“We can kind of see the light at the end of the tunnel, but we’re still struggling,” Mary Bett said.
Now 32, she is proud of the partnership she and Aaron, 45, have built to weather all of these storms – both natural and personal.
Yet she credits her husband for keeping things fun and creative for all of them through these tough times – organizing family drawing nights; arts and crafts projects; and water balloon fights when the AC broke.
“He’s the fun parent,” Kamdyn, now 12, agreed.
For Mary Bett, Aaron has been so much more than that.
“He’s my knight in shining armor.”
How to help
You can donate to Season of Sharing by going to cfsarasota.org or calling 941-556-2399. You can also mail a check to Season of Sharing, Community Foundation of Sarasota County, 2635 Fruitville Road, Sarasota, FL 34237.
This story comes from a partnership between the Sarasota Herald-Tribune and the Community Foundation of Sarasota County. Saundra Amrhein covers the Season of Sharing campaign, along with issues surrounding housing, utilities, child care and transportation in the area. She can be reached at [email protected].
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