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GREENSBORO — By now, Marie Alexander has probably finished cooking.

She expected to start late Wednesday afternoon, boiling the collards. She planned to cook all night, filling her kitchen with the smells that always make her 8-year-old granddaughter Nisa gush.

“Nonni,” she often tells her grandmother. “It smells so good in here!”

Nutmeg and onions. Brown sugar and cloves. And the drone of a den TV, spouting lines as familiar as family pictures to Marie.

Every Thanksgiving, Marie watches five of her favorite movies, always in this order: “The Color Purple,” “Forrest Gump,” “Steel Magnolias,” “Fried Green Tomatoes” and “The Green Mile.”

It helps her get in the holiday mood because she has to see and feed a crowd. She is a mother to six, a grandmother to 12, and today, she’ll expect to feed at least 30 in her 2,200-square-foot house.

But her Thanksgiving ritual also helps her remember and recall what she wrote two decades ago on a beam in her basement.

“Thank you, God.”

She’s in a house she calls her own. It wasn’t always like that.

She and her husband, Cliff, struggled. They lived white-knuckled and stressed, rattled by the violence and drug deals they saw around them, and later by the rats and backed-up sewer lines they found inside.

They first lived in an apartment in Claremont Courts, a federal housing community in Greensboro. And there, on a spring day in 1985, in the afternoon, Marie saw her daughter Crystalyn get jumped.

Crystalyn was no more than 8. Three girls, no older than 13, attacked her 50 feet from her back door. One girl held Crystalyn’s legs. Another girl sat on her back. The other cut Crystalyn’s hair with a pair of scissors.

Marie ran to help her daughter. Two of the girls fled. The third didn’t. She didn’t see Marie until she felt someone grab her arm and pull her off.

“I’m gonna get my Mama!” the girl wailed.

“Go get your Mama!” Marie seethed.

Marie stormed inside, grabbed a straight razor from her medicine cabinet and met the girl’s mother on the sidewalk, face-to-face, straight-razor in hand.

“Hit me,” Marie told the mother.

Ten feet away, a woman prayed at her front door. Marie saw her and pocketed the straight razor and told the girl’s mother, “I’m going home. Don’t be stupid enough to follow me.”

The mother wasn’t. Marie broke down and cried. She had felt murder in her heart. When Cliff got home from his job, her mind was made up.

“We’re going house hunting,” she told him.

They found an 11-room rental house off Randolph Street for $500 a month. Yet, even though they escaped the violence of Claremont Courts, they walked into a shack of a house so unsightly their kids wouldn’t catch the school bus out front.

They walked to another bus stop down the street. They were too embarrassed.

Rats jumped from the cabinets. Bees hummed in the walls. The house’s sewer line got clogged once a month, and panes from the windows fell if you slammed doors too hard.

Meanwhile, the house was so cold during the winter Marie drove around in her car to get warm.

She hated the house. And she hated her life. From 1987 to 1989, she worked a stream of temporary jobs — at least 44, from cleaning hotel rooms to collecting leaves — and she found her life going nowhere.

That’s when she thought about suicide. Marie figured she could drive the wrong way on U.S. 29, barrel into an 18-wheeler and end her misery.

“God,” she prayed, “I always heard that you won’t forgive self-murder, but I don’t have a chance. Take care of my children and my husband. I’m checking out.” Minutes after her prayer, she saw the phone number 275-HOME on the TV. She was watching WFMY’s “The Good Morning Show,” and she heard co-host Lee Kinard interview someone from Habitat for Humanity of Greater Greensboro.

Marie called the phone number and explained her plight — six kids, blind husband and a drafty house full of rats.

“You’re just the people we’re looking for,” a woman told Marie.

Today, Habitat for Humanity has built more than 350 homes in Greensboro. But Marie’s house was No. 2. It was built in 1988 by a sea of volunteers, including Marie. She came every day to the construction site, pulling her son Marvin in a red wagon.

Marvin is grown. So is Crystalyn. And Marie is 56.

Earlier this year, Marie retired from her supervisor job at Polo Ralph Lauren, a company she had worked at ever since she had moved into her house off Bellevue Street 20 years ago.

“I am never leaving Bellevue,” Marie tells everyone.

The home cost the Alexanders $36,108. Marie can recite that figure like her own phone number. And today, she and Cliff, now a supervisor at Industries of the Blind, own the house outright.

Marie often tells her story at Habitat functions, and when she does, she sounds like a poet. In a voice slightly louder than a whisper, she talks about feeling like a caterpillar, inching through life, and turning into a butterfly.

All thanks to her cocoon, her own home, her place for Thanksgiving.

“If it were legal, I’d put a sign on my roof and have it flash day and night, 'The House That Love Built,’” she says a few days before her all-night vigil in the kitchen. “As a child, I always thought God created angels to create miracles.

“But really, He uses people. Ordinary people.”

Contact Jeri Rowe at 373-7374 or jeri.rowe@news-record.com