ANDERSON COUNTY — Sun glistens off Katie Grace’s golden blonde hair as she sits atop a grass-green picnic table. Donned in her favorite color, pink, she takes center stage in the conversation for a minute. “Play with me, mommy,” she pleads.

Katie Grace wraps her 3-year-old hands around a tiny toy. A few minutes later, she’s onto to something else. She has a bowl of Cheerio snack mix. She holds it out and offers to share.

All the while, her mother, 25-year-old Lorin Larason is telling a very grown-up story — a tale that she may one day pass on to her daughter if she has the courage.

It is a story of well-built foundations, ignorance of youth, bad choices and reclaimed faith.

Larason admits there are some clichés in her story too. But that doesn’t make the parts of her story any less meaningful, any less tragic in parts or hopeful in others.

“I tell everybody that the Salvation Army saved my life,” Larason said.

Saved her life from lies, a path — that she admits could have led to jail, prostitution and the loss of her daughter — and from an addiction to a myriad of drugs, including cocaine.

To see her now, none of that is apparent. She is the picture of a loving mother, one who has brought her daughter to a park on sunny afternoon so she can use up some of that toddler energy on the jungle gym.

It started in high school, Larason says.

She didn’t fit in. But who does in high school?

And she was in her senior year, riding around with a group of kids. They were drinking. One of them had some marijuana and offered it to Larason. She wasn’t raised in a home where this kind of behavior was acceptable, she says, but the choice seemed harmless at the time.

Then the drugs played a trick on her. They made her feel safe.

And for a while, she was. She was still at home, still under her parents’ watchful eye. Things changed when she went to away to a horse farm for a summer before she started her first semester at Clemson University.

Larason was away from friends, family and in the middle of nowhere, she says.

By the time she finished her summer away from home and landed on Clemson’s campus, Larason was “ready to party.”

“I have some really bad tapes that I have to play in my head in order to stay sober,” Larason says.

She enrolled at Clemson University as an agriculture and applied economics major. Most of the time, though, Larason didn’t even make it to class. She slept through them or she found herself just finishing up a round of late-night partying and wasn’t sober enough to make it. By this point, her experiment with marijuana was leading her to acid, Xanax and cocaine.

“Cocaine was my drug of choice,” she says.

Three semesters later Larason was on academic probation and her parents made her go to Tri-County Technical College. She didn’t cut it there either. Half-way through the semester she dropped out. And then she was introduced to crack cocaine.

This young woman, with waves of brown hair flowing down across her shoulders and a still-baby quality to her face, was stealing from those who loved her most.

At the age of 20, she was no longer a college student. Two years later she had Katie Grace. She had been evicted from several apartments. Her parents were nearing the end of their rope. Her friends were fewer and fewer. She even spent time in jail.

Finally, Larason was evicted out of an apartment in Greenville.

She was on the verge of losing her daughter – who was really being taken care of by her parents already. And she had nowhere to go.

“I had used up all my resources,” Larason says. “Nobody trusted me.”

So she made a call to the Salvation Army in Anderson. “When I called the Salvation Army, I had tears rolling down my face the whole time.”

When she arrived at the Army’s shelter near Anderson’s downtown, Larason had the clothes on her back and a duffel bag. The moment she sat on the bed in her new-found living quarters, she felt waves of guilt and shame hit her. She wasn’t raised this way. A foundation her family built so many years ago came back. The drugs revealed their evil. They had lied to her. She wasn’t safe.

“I realized that unless I wanted to go back out there and die I needed to do something,” Larason said. “I felt like if I did the right thing from that day forward, I was going to be OK.”

On Oct. 15 – in about two weeks – she will celebrate two years of being sober.

Just a few weeks ago, she was named as an AmeriCorp volunteer and is working with United Way of Anderson County. Katie Grace is back with her, they both attend NewSpring Community Church and she has her own place again.

She admits that her climb back up to sobriety hasn’t been made alone.

This young mother has had the help of God, friends, family and several of Anderson’s non-profits — like the Salvation Army, United Way of Anderson County and the Anderson Interfaith Ministries’ Women and Children Succeeding program.

In December 2009, if you ride by the Anderson University campus, you might see Larason in her graduation robe, smiling with a diploma in her hand. This time, though, she will graduate with a degree in human services and resources. Larason said it’s time for her to give back.

“That’s the best way for me to say thank you.”