Three Cottage Grove children are getting a gift: the ability to play outdoors.
“I just feel so blessed,” said Sheletta Brundidge, as a contractor and volunteers gathered in her backyard Thursday.
They are working on a new fence, which will allow her children to play outdoors — something they have not been able to do this summer. Four local Lions Clubs teamed up to install the $4,000 wooden fence and are set to begin this week.
As her children grabbed at her legs, Brundidge marveled at the generosity that the Lions had shown.
“I had never even heard of the Lions Club, but that is their mission — to help families in need,” Brundidge said.
She and her husband bought their Cottage Grove home in December. One feature they liked was the white picket fence around the backyard. It would be a perfect play area for their children, ages 1, 3, and 4, all of whom have autism.
But then spring came, the snow melted, and Brundidge took her kids outside to play.
Only then did she notice the fence was a wreck.
The vinyl-clad pickets had been glued to the crossbeams and were falling off. The vertical posts had popped out of the ground because of shoddy anchoring.
The vinyl was moldy, and the fence wasn’t even attached to the house, so anyone could walk through the gaps.
“I am not sure who the genius was who put this together,” said Brundidge, shaking her head at a missing slat.
One child broke through the fence and ran away. Brundidge spotted him three houses away, playing on a jungle gym.
“The kids could just push on the boards and walk right through,” said Brundidge.
The family got an estimate for a chain-link fence, but it was too high.
“We are not needy, but we are both working people,” Brundidge said. “We pay for speech therapy for three kids and prescriptions and Pampers.”
So she tried to take the kids to nearby parks.
But the kids could not be controlled. “They are wanderers. They don’t come when you call them,” Brundidge said.
To her, Minnesota looked like the land of 10,000 drowning hazards.
“Parks are terrifying for me. It just seems like there is water everywhere you go,” she said.
“When I was with the kids, I would think: Which ones are going to live today? Which ones are going to drown?”
Eventually, she gave up. “We just decided,” said Brundidge, “we were not going to go outside.”
That’s when the Lions Clubs came to the rescue.
Jenn Bierma heard about Brundidge’s dilemma and presented it to her New-Park Lions Club.
Eventually, she got help from three other clubs — the Cottage Grove Lions Club, the St. Paul Park/Newport Lions Club and the Park-Port Lioness Club. All of the clubs have members in or near Newport, St. Paul Park and Cottage Grove.
But the clubs decided not to build the $3,000 chain-link fence that Brundidge had wanted. That’s because one of the Lions also had a child with autism, who had climbed over chain-link fences in the past.
Instead, the clubs insisted on a $4,000 wooden fence with vertical slats, which make it kid-proof.
Brundidge held a kind of kick-off event Thursday, welcoming the Lions, the fencing contractor and her father, who traveled from Houston, Texas, to help.
She is grateful for the community rallying to help her children.
“When they told me about the wooden fence, that touched my heart,” said Brundidge. “They were thinking of my children.”