Maria Simmons begins to move out of her family’s rented home a year ago.

The Providence Journal / John Freidah

This time last year, Maria and Ken Simmons hauled a Christmas tree into their new rental house in East Providence, feeling grateful the way people do when something as basic as shelter is no longer taken for granted.

They, like so many other tenants in Rhode Island, learned a hard lesson about the housing crisis: you don’t have to own a house to lose it to foreclosure. So when the Simmonses finally landed another rental house last Christmas, the family — including Maria’s three children and a grandchild — were finding reasons to be thankful.

This Christmas, Maria Simmons still finds reasons to be thankful, even though her life, as so often happens, has not turned out as she’d planned.

Maria’s 19-year-old daughter, Nicole, who has been receiving treatments for cancer, gave birth to a healthy baby girl, now 4½ months.

Maria has since moved with her children back to San Antonio. She and Ken, an Army veteran who fought in Iraq, are in the process of getting a divorce.

“I think a lot of it was stress,” Maria said. “He working nights. Me working days. The kids. … We really didn’t have time for each other.”

Ken, 27, loads boxes at Wal-Mart in Providence. He was about to head off to work when a reporter called. “Times are tough,” he said. His apartment in Cranston costs $700 per month.

In San Antonio, Maria pays $900 a month for a four-bedroom house with two baths, a two-car garage and a fenced backyard. Maria works as a nursing assistant for $10.35 an hour. Jobs are easier to find there, she said.

In Texas, the unemployment rate last month was 5.7 percent, compared with 9.3 percent in Rhode Island.

Maria, 41, said this June she plans to go back to school to become a massage therapist.

“Maybe I’ll get my own little salon,” she said, “and have Nicky help me.”

— Journal Staff Writer Lynn Arditi

larditi@projo.com