The Chelsea Standard
A Heritage Newspaper
Weekly Publication
FULL DISCLOSURE
Life's unbelievable rollercoaster ride leaves Chelsea native passing the Michigan Bar and finding solace
By Terry Jacoby, Heritage Newspapers
PUBLISHED: January 8, 2009
There are no guaranteed contracts when you sign on to play for "life." While signs along the side of the road can be helpful and friends and family can help point the way, only the driver knows where they're going. And some times - most of the times, really - the maps and blueprints don't help because the curves life throws at you aren't known or documented or anticipated.
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It's why so many end up in the ditch.
That's why they call it life.
Leslie Butler has been "driving her car" for 42 years. Her drive wasn't always simple growing up, but she managed to steer her way through the halls of Chelsea High School all the way to graduation in 1984.
The rest of her trip would be a wild ride that ended up in the ditch more than a few times. But perhaps because she became accustomed to getting right back behind the wheel, her journey through life seems to be on full speed toward success and happiness.
Leslie's trip is more than just intriguing and interesting. It's inspirational and can leave one asking, "What if that was me?" "How would I have handled that?" "How would I have gotten out of the ditch?"
The best place to start in Leslie's story is where she started...the beginning.
Turning the key
"I tried college, but life just took me in a different direction," Leslie says, while sitting outside a trendy coffee shop in Ann Arbor. The sun is bright and the wind brisk while Leslie smiles thinking about high school, Chelsea and how long ago that all seems.
"The key for me is how you respond to it," she says, repeating a running theme that would take her from high school to starting her own law firm. With a few ditches in between.
"I went to art school in Atlanta and took some classes at Washtenaw Community College," she says. "I went back and forth between Atlanta and Chelsea."
She spent two terms learning fashion design at The American College for Applies Arts, a popular art school in Atlanta. While at WCC she took some liberal art classes, ones that she could eventually transfer to a four-year school. At least that was the plan.
During one of her stops in the Chelsea area, she met her future husband, Terry, while working at an Ann Arbor restaurant. Terry had recently committed to college at Eastern Michigan University.
"After discovering I was pregnant, I put college on hold and had a baby." A son, Brendan, was a blessing, not a road block.
When Brendan was 10 months old, Leslie was accepted at Eastern Michigan University for a liberal arts degree and Terry had transferred to U-M Art School for a degree in graphic design.
"I always wanted to graduate from college," she said. "That was always one of my goals, but I didn't know how to get from here to there. And no one in my family knew anything about it."
Neither of Leslie's parents or grandparents had a college degree.
When Brendan was two, Leslie and Terry started to discuss expanding the family. After carefully deciding that a baby born in January 1991 would be good, Leslie discovered she was already pregnant and due in October 1990 - right at midterm of her last semester at Eastern.
So instead of just worrying about homework and taking good notes in class, she also was nursing and changing diapers. Her son Kieran was another blessing and a gift she would never have second thoughts about. It was just another of life's "changes in direction."
And having a baby didn't stop her from attending school either.
"Brendan was in day care at Eastern and Kieran was with me," Leslie said. "I had my books and my diaper bag with me. It wasn't easy, but I managed. The teacher would always shake her head at me. Kieran was only 10 days old and he was already in college.
"But I was determined to finish and I promised my mom I would."
That word determine shows up a lot in Leslie's story. It's a word she has carried with her from the start and has been an important companion.
Now I'm a farmer
For about a year Leslie designed wedding gowns for a shop in Manchester, but it was "hard to do with two small children at home," she said. "Sticky fingers and white satin don't mix. So for a year or two, I just raised my kids."
Meanwhile, Terry was the head of the graphics department at the Ann Arbor Observer. But he lost his job in the Fall of 1991.
"We went into emergency mode and did whatever we could to survive," Leslie said. "Terry started bartending just to make some money. This was when we decided we had to go in a totally different direction."
A "different direction" is a bit of an understatement. The different direction was a U-turn to the great up north.
Terry went to Michigan State and took a tree certification program and graduated from there.
"He wanted to run an organic orchard," Leslie said. "The northwestern part of lower Michigan was the best place for this kind of orchard so we found some property in Leelanau County. So in September 1994 we moved to the country."
From Chelsea, to art school, to college, to having babies to life on a farm. You could say it was a different direction. A right turn out of nowhere, but also out of necessity.
"I started working on another farm just so I could learn what to do," Leslie said. "So for five and half days a week I was working on someone else's farm."
In the spring of 1995, Leslie and Terry planted their first group of trees on the farm. And since this was an orchard, the trees had to be heeled-in by hand. Also, the 20-acre property didn't include a house, so they bought a trailer they would call home for the "near" future.
"Because we were planting fruit trees, we knew it would be five years before we got our return on the investment and started making money," Leslie said.
To make money in the interim, Terry bartended - at Red Hawk in Ann Arbor. He would travel from Traverse City to Ann Arbor on most weekends to tend bar and would stay with family while in town. During the week he would do everything from working in a cherry orchard to working in a bakery to doing carpentry.
Leslie, meanwhile, was taking care of the kids, waiting tables and working with an interior decorator and a landscaping business. She also worked in the same bakery as Terry.
They both worked with dough to make dough. Whatever it took.
"It was our make-do farm, we used to always say," Leslie said.
Making do was becoming a way of life for Leslie and Terry.
Heartbreak (Part I)
In the spring of 1999, the Butler's life was blooming right outside their window. They had 500 apples trees ready to bloom into a comfortable living - finally. You don't just plant an apple tree and start making apple sauce the next weekend. It takes years for apple trees to grow and become productive. The wait, so it seemed, was over.
But - a word that comes up quite often in Leslie's story - the apple trees were hit with fire blight, a destructive bacterial disease of apples and pears that kills blossoms, shoots, limbs and, sometimes, entire trees. The disease causes severe losses in some orchards in some years and little or no significant damage in others.
For the Butlers, it was severe.
The destructive potential and sporadic nature of fire blight, along with the fact that epidemics often develop in several different phases, make this disease difficult and costly to control.
Leslie had had enough. Understandably, it was too much for her to take.
"We really thought this was the year we had been waiting for," she said. "But when we discovered the fire blight, I just lost it. I was done. Four years of growth were wiped out and we lost 450 of the 500 trees. We were supposed to be in a trailer for six months and we ended up there over six years."
In 1999, the Butlers finally found that house they were looking for and moved it onto their property. It was a home that had been removed from the Sleeping Bear National Lakeshore. But - there's that word, again - the house needed a lot of work. They spent their time refurbishing the house and trying to bring it up to code, while they worked there numerous jobs. Terry was hoping to have better luck with peaches then he had with apples and again hope was sitting their on the horizon.
"The house sat there for two years while we worked on it, everything from plumbing to electrical to windows," Leslie said. "We really had no time for the family. We were either working our jobs or on the farm or on the house.
"We were ready to move in at one point when we had to wait another three months because the building inspector wouldn't approve it."
In February 2001, the wait was over and the Butlers moved into their house and sold the trailer. The spring came and so did the rains, a good sign for the peach trees. Unfortunately, good signs are no guarantees and disaster struck again.
The peach trees blossomed, but the peaches had brown rot, a fungal condition that attacks stone fruit, commonly affecting peaches, pears, apples and plums. The fruit develops small brown squishy circles, which gradually spread over the surface of the fruit. Once the fruit is entirely infected, it shrivels up and develops a fuzzy coating of fungus.
"We couldn't sell them," Leslie said. "And this is when Terry lost it. It was the final straw for both of us."
Life change...again
Terry decided he wanted to go back to school to get his teaching certification from Eastern. "And I didn't want to wait tables my whole life," Leslie said.
What she did want to do - what she always wanted to do - was go to the University of Michigan. From the fields of Traverse City to the classrooms of Ann Arbor? Sounded like a big leap, but the Butlers were determined to make the jump.
"We sold everything we had up north, the house, the property, everything," Leslie said.
But what to study?
"I was doing some substitute teaching up north and enjoyed it, so I thought about either teaching or engineering, my dream from high school, or possibly history," she said.
Both Leslie and Terry applied and were accepted and they moved into family housing in Ann Arbor in 2002. A new house, another direction and new dreams. Leslie decided on a teaching degree in history and Terry provided some steady income returning to bartending and carpentry.
In December 2003, Leslie completed the big leap with a history degree - with distinction - from U-M. But she still didn't have her teaching degree to go with it.
"It would have taken me another three years to get the teaching degree, so I figured if I was going to go to school for three more years, I might as well go to law school," she said. "I was accepted into the Wayne State University Law School."
Leslie knew this wasn't going to be easy. Studying law is hard enough, but she also had a family to help take care of and also was working full-time as an office administrator with an Ann Arbor realtor. She spent two years going to school and working full-time.
Terry also had finished his teaching degree and had gotten a job with Willow Run Schools teaching art full-time.
"I was really struggling with school," Leslie admitted. "It hit me like a ton of bricks."
Heartbreak (Part II)
Spring Break of the first year of law school, Leslie was scheduled to take the week off of work and relax after finishing a difficult 50 page "brief." All she had to do was get through work on Friday and the break began.
It wasn't long after getting to work, when Leslie started feeling ill. Her thumb started to twitch, her arm went numb and she was feeling dizzy when she decided to sit down.
"It was the day before my break, and I got on the intercom to tell the other person in the office I wasn't feeling well," Leslie said. "The guy came up from his desk and called an ambulance right away."
Leslie spent that night, March 13, 2005, in the hospital while they ran some tests and doctors determined it was a migraine. Leslie went back to school and made an oral argument, but didn't feel well the rest of the semester. Maybe it was all the stress - that would hardly be a surprise to anyone. So she did the smart thing. She took the remainder of the summer off to lessen her stress as the family was moving into their own home in Ann Arbor.
Leslie returned for her second year of law school eager to do well, but continued to struggle.
"It was frustrating to not get the grades I knew I could get, I wanted to finish out the semester and quit my job so I could focus fully on school starting in the spring," she said. She and Terry decided that she would quit her job in May 2006.
Leslie then focused on the spring term and prepared for Brendan's graduation from Huron High School.
Just as Leslie was letting her guard down and starting to relax into school, her life took another turn in another direction. One that would truly challenge her determination.
On the evening of June 15, 2006, Leslie did some research on a few things she had to finish up with, worked out and then went to bed at around 11 p.m. She woke up the next morning with what she says felt like was a head cold.
"I couldn't get up and couldn't move," she said. "Then the whole thing is a blur. It was 8 a.m. and Terry was getting ready to go on an interview and everyone was in the house. I recall falling and crawling on the ground. Terry said, 'you up already.' And my reply was all garbled and I was drooling."
Terry went into "panic mode" and called an ambulance right away.
Doctors determined that during the night Leslie had a stroke. They also believe she had one on March 15, 2005. But this one was more severe.
"Here I was at age 39 in the hospital with a stroke," Leslie said. "It was devastating. I didn't smoke, was in good shape and had no family history."Leslie spent five days in the hospital and was sent home where her family would take care of her. She admits that she was lost and confused. What do you do after you have a stroke? She had no idea. But she did know one thing.
"I wanted to be me," she said, her emotions catching up to her during her lowest point of the roller coaster ride.
Usually, that's not a big request. But it was all Leslie really wanted. She wanted to return to the life she was making for herself and her family. She knew the dreams she was chasing were within reach. She just wanted a chance to grab a hold of them.
"I was able to walk but still had my share of problems and couldn't see very well," she said. "I went through some difficult therapy. It was not a happy time and it was hard. But everyday I was getting better, and doctors told me the majority of improvement would come in the first three months."Fighting back
Leslie was five weeks into a seven-week semester and had lost it all. What she didn't lose, what she's never lost, is her ability to overcome and persevere, despite the odds. She could handle this. It was a setback, a roadblock; not an exit or an ending.
In the fall, only months after being blindsided by a stroke, Leslie Butler was back in class, studying to become a lawyer and working on fulfilling a dream.
"I only took nine credit hours, limited myself to two nights a week, and cut out important extra-curricular activities" she said. "I made a strict schedule for myself. The stroke really changed my perspective on everything."
Once Leslie got back on her feet, and with this new approach on life, there was no stopping her.
"I did better in school after the stroke," she said. "I wasn't working and I managed my schedule better and I worked harder to do better in school."
While in Law School, Leslie was a semifinalist in the school's mock trial competition and during her last year at school, she was a legal intern with the Wayne County Prosecutor's Office Deed Fraud Unit assisting in the prosecution of deed and mortgage fraud.
In the Fall of 2007, she consulted with the Chief of Staff for Sen. Hansen Clarke (D-Detroit) in the drafting of legislation to prevent foreclosure fraud in Michigan.
To prepare for the Bar Exam at the end of July, she studied every day and took courses designed to help her prepare. "They are not testing you on the rules, but the exceptions to the rules," she says.
But she knew she was ready. She had prepared herself for this moment.
Leslie A. Butler, a Chelsea High School graduate and former farmer, waitress, art student and stroke victim, graduated from Wayne State University Law School on May 12. Leslie, who also sits on the Board of Directors for Community Housing Alternatives, a non-profit corporation dedicated to affordable housing for low income families in Washtenaw County, sat for the July 2008 Bar.
In October she was told she had passed the Michigan Bar Exam on the first try and was sworn in to the Michigan State Bar in Pontiac in November. Last month Leslie was sworn in to the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Michigan.
The future
The rollercoaster is riding along high these days. In fact, the wild ride seems a thing of the past as diplomas hang on the walls like security blankets. Leslie is healthy and happy and looking forward to starting her new career with determination, dedication and purpose.
"My current plans for employment involve starting a new general practice and real estate law firm in Ann Arbor, along with the assistance of some generous local attorneys who have agreed to mentor me as I start my venture," Leslie said with plenty of optimism in her voice.
She also is optimistic about her health.
"The doctors narrowed down the cause of my stroke to either the birth control pills that I was taking, because they do carry an increased risk of clotting, or it was 'just a fluke event," she says. "We will never truly know."
Leslie, though, knows where she's headed. Her family is growing up and they all share a special bond of overcoming adversity.
While Leslie focuses on growing her fledgling practice, Terry continues to teach art at an Ypsilanti charter school and will apply to graduate school this winter at Eastern to further his printmaking skills. Brendan will continue working on an architectonics degree from Washtenaw Community College while working at the special collections Map Library at U-M.
Finally, Kieran, who is a senior at Community High, will continue working as a Web site developer for a local computer consulting company while anxiously awaiting attending college in the fall with his friends.
"Life is truly good," Leslie says.
The future seems bright. "I just want to be me" proved to be a worthwhile goal.
Leslie A. Butler handles most law issues, but focuses on real estate law, both commercial and residential.The Law Offices of Leslie A. Butler, PLLC are at 2281 Manchester Road in Ann Arbor. She can be reached at 734-929-2761.
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