MILO – Cuddling a fussy toddler in a darkened kitchen that reeked of the last vapors from an empty propane tank, Renee Baillargeon, 22, was distraught.

With no propane left to fuel the cook stove, she pointed out that her family has been relegated to cooking meals on a small electric grill or in a microwave.

But the lack of propane was the least of her worries, she said during a recent interview.

Baillargeon, her two small children, a younger sister, a male relative, her mother, three cats, a dog, six birds, and a rabbit live in her mother’s dilapidated High Street home.

The windows in the sparsely furnished home are cracked, holes in the roof leave a skating rink on the kitchen floor on rainy days, groundwater rushes through the cellar like a river, and there is no insulation to help prevent the heat from a wood stove and an oil furnace from escaping through the cracks into the winter air.

“Every three weeks, we go through 100 gallons of oil,” Baillargeon’s mother Darlene Cook, 54, said Thursday. With the oil tank nearing empty and faced with an outstanding oil bill of more than $1,000, Cook and Baillargeon worry the oil soon could be shut off.

The mother and daughter have tried to stretch their combined income of about $1,300 a month. However, the gap between their income and the escalating price of oil, utilities and food is now a chasm.

“It was bad enough to pay $2,500 for oil last year, but now I must pay up to $3,000 [for this year alone] and I still have the rest of the year to go,” Cook said recently.

To save on electricity, the family uses the lights in the house only in the early morning or at night. They do, however, keep a cellar light on continually to operate the sump pump, which empties the cellar of the water.

Employed as a local convenience store clerk, Cook said she inherited the formerly well-maintained home from her mother. At the time, she was a single mother of three children and she spent most of the income from the often multiple jobs she worked on the family.

“Everything I made over the years was to keep my kids going,” Cook said. The small amount of leftover funds were used for minor house repairs, she said. Over time, those minor problems turned into major headaches, but the family has had to overlook them.

It isn’t that the family hasn’t asked for help – they have. The Penquis organization purchased the wood last fall for the family’s wood stove. Cook said a Penquis official told her it would take a year for action on her request for housing rehabilitation help.

Until then, the family is surviving, but barely. In addition to her pay as a dishwasher at a local restaurant, Baillargeon receives about $250 a month from the state for her children and she gets about $170 a month in food stamps.

The cost of diapers and other necessities often sends her to the Living Word Community Food Cupboard in Dover-Foxcroft.

Finances were so tight this week – the family had about $30 left for the week after paying bills – that to purchase gasoline to get to Dover-Foxcroft, Baillargeon returned some repair parts she’d purchased for her 2000 Chevrolet Impala.

The car needs to be repaired, so the male relative, who is looking for a job, will have transportation, according to Baillargeon.

“It kind of stresses me out,” Cook said of the family’s plight.

Defending the fact she has pets, Cook said the family loves animals just as others do. Her dog is fed scraps of leftover food salvaged from her workplace, she said. The birds were inherited from an older woman who knew Cook would take care of them, and the cats and rabbit kind of migrated to the house via Cook’s 12-year-old daughter.

The animals are part of the family, according to Baillargeon. Before the winter is over, the family may have to snuggle with the animals to keep warm, she said.

“We haven’t gone cold yet, but we’re getting close,” Cook said.

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