~CONTENT POWERED BY FLOOD MARKETING~
To know all you need to know about the woman with the kind smile and comforting eyes is to know that setting atop the slightly-askew card table are plates, cups, napkins, plastic cutlery, a quarter jug of apple juice and a partially-eaten breakfast casserole covered with plastic wrap.
“They’ve been working so hard I figured they might get hungry,” the woman explains of the modest offering she placed out on her front porch earlier in the day for the workers moving diligently about the yard and up and down the ladders. “And it’s nice to cook for other people. I don’t cook much anymore because it’s just me and I know I’m not going to eat it all,” she says with a light laugh.
That’s all you really need to know about H. Marlene Stratton to know that she is a highly-deserving recipient of an incredibly-unique gift.
As the chosen nominee in Wyoming Roofing’s Nominate Your Neighbor program — cosponsored by Knecht Home Center, Owens Corning, Rocky Mountain Exteriors and Sheridan Media — Stratton received a new roof and gutter system for her home on South Sheridan Avenue free of charge.
Bonnie Gregory, owner of Wyoming Roofing along with her husband Ryan, says the local business received around 60 neighbor nominations this year, the first in the program’s existence.
“It was a tough decision,” explains Gregory of selecting one recipient, “but we decided to re-roof Mrs. Stratton’s home based on her continued efforts to give back to the community, no matter how little she had herself.”
Stratton was nominated by friend and fellow Calvary Baptist Church parishioner Sherrill Trode, who wrote in her nomination, “Mrs. Stratton is a 76-year old widow on a fixed income. She is a generous lady – knitting baby blankets for the hospital, giving away eggs from her chickens, helping needy mothers with childcare, playing piano for her church. She does not have family financially capable of helping her. This is the roof that was on the house when she and her husband bought it in 2000. If it does not get replaced soon, the house will be irreparably damaged.”
“With any kind of wind or weather, shingles would be flying off of the house,” Stratton says of the former roof’s rapidly-deteorating condition. “I’m so incredibly thrilled about the roof and the nomination. Sherrill is such a good person, like so many people I’ve come to know in Sheridan.”
Stratton and her late husband Ken moved to Sheridan in 2000 from Custer, South Dakota; in 2007, Ken passed away from cancer. But Stratton hasn’t been all on her own since that point. “I have many friends like Sherrill that help me,” she says, gazing up at her newly-shingled roof. “Sheridan is a great place to live.”
