His home was devastated by winter storms, she offered to help. Now, they’re engaged.

The way Benjamin Short sees it, sometimes beautiful things can come from life’s darkest moments.

In January 2023, Short, now 44, was struggling to navigate the biggest disaster he had faced in his life. After a series of atmospheric rivers triggered a landslide that threatened to send Short’s Lompico home tumbling down a hill, county officials told Short the house wasn’t safe for habitation and posted a red tag on a window near his front door. 

Within days, his insurance company had already denied Short’s claim. The pumping station for his septic tank washed away with the landslide so he had no plumbing. He couldn’t afford to stay in a hotel. Terrified that his home would slide downhill or endanger his neighbors, he slept with his keys and phone in his pocket in case he needed to run out of the house in the middle of the night. 

Just up the street from where Short was living his nightmare, Shannon Iliescu logged onto Nextdoor. 

Iliescu, 44, had been renting her Lompico home for four years and had driven past Short’s home countless times, though the two had never met. But when Iliescu read a Lookout story about Short’s plight that someone posted to the neighborhood social media platform, her heart went out to him. 

“I was like, ‘Oh, this poor guy doesn’t have any running water. Is he able to cook!?’” she recalled. 

She tracked him down on Nextdoor and sent him a message saying: “I live up the street from you, would you like to maybe have me bring you some food?’” Short accepted the offer.

It was an evening in early February when she brought over dinner, a home-cooked meal of quinoa, tofu and vegetables. “She just showed up on my doorstep, out of nowhere,” Short recalled. 

Iliescu, who runs her own house-cleaning business, was impressed by Short’s indoor plant collection and his saltwater aquarium. She also had a lot of indoor plants and an aquarium. Short, who works in human resources at UC Santa Cruz, noticed they liked the same music and had been to see the same artist in the same place just days apart. 

Days later, he returned her dishes and the two spent hours talking into the night. “We just instantly hit it off,” Short said “She’s amazing. She’s just like my other half. I didn’t know I had another half like that.” 

They started dating almost immediately. He met her son, Jack, now 11. “It’s just really weird and unexpected,” Iliescu said, “because neither one of us were really looking for anything at that point.” 

In April, the pair went to a beach town in Mexico to see the total solar eclipse. They walked out to a little rocky peninsula by the water and surrounded by goats, where Short surprised Iliescu by popping the question. 

The eclipse “was the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen. I started crying,” she said. “I turned around, and I was like, ‘Oh my gosh, it’s so beautiful.’ And he’s just like, ‘Will you marry me?’ I don’t know how you’re gonna ever top that.” 

Short recalls that after Iliescu said yes, a goat chimed in with a “yayyy.”

The two haven’t scheduled a wedding date yet as they’re focused on reconstructing the hillside in front of Short’s home. After that’s finished, Iliescu and her son plan to move in with Short and then they’ll start preparing for the wedding. 

The road to recovery for Short has been a long and uncertain one. His home remains red-tagged. He still has no plumbing and uses a port-a-potty in his driveway. After insurance denied his claim, he applied for a Small Business Administration (SBA) loan to pay for the reconstruction and reinforcement of the hillside. 

The SBA awarded him $240,000, which covers almost all of the $300,000 or so he thinks the project will cost. For the remaining balance, he’s received donations and used all of his savings. It’s an enormous project, but after months of weighing his options, Short chose to save his home of 14 years. 

“With this happening, I really had to start making some decisions, ‘How much am I going to spend on this? What’s the value of my house, what’s the cost of all this?'” he said. “Doing all this construction, I just lost all the equity I put into my house, but I still have the home.”

On Sept. 30, construction workers started preparing and building a retaining wall, which Short hopes will be done by the end of December. The wall includes 14 steel girders that are 36 feet long, going about 25 feet into the ground. The girders are reinforced with concrete and rebar connecting them. Workers will put wood in front of the girders and fill in the back with dirt. 

At least three different kinds of engineers helped develop the plan and county officials approved an emergency permit for Short. 

To prepare for the rain two weeks ago, crews covered the project with tarps and paused their work. After 8 inches of rain fell, some dirt slid out from the top of the hillside adjacent to the house. The loss of dirt destabilized a post that supports a walkway and caused the railing of the walkway to break in one area. 

As Short described the damage, he was uneasy. The winter season brings with it a fresh round of anxieties. The sound of rain leaves him tense and shaking and makes it difficult for him to sleep, worried he will have to keep checking the tarps protecting his property.

Standing next to him, Iliescu said it’s been a difficult time, but she supports him however she can. 

“I’m kind of like a fixer, I want to help and I want to give my opinion,” she said. “But at the same time, it was like well, this really isn’t my house, and so I’ve just tried to be there for him.”

Despite the ongoing worries over his home, Short marvels at the turn of events. The universe has a funny way of offering its lessons, he said. For Illescu, the lesson is that it’s sometimes worth it to lead with your heart. For Short, the lesson is that good can come out of a terrible situation. 

“In the midst of probably the biggest tragedy and difficult thing I’ve ever had to face in my life, there was this amazing thing that happened from it,” he said. “This is just so awful having my home broken by the storm but if that didn’t happen, I probably would have never met her.” 

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