Serving as a laundry buddy provides the personal stories behind homelessness

A number of years ago I started doing laundry for unhoused folks. At the time I had a preschooler and a kindergartener and doing weekly laundry seemed an ideal way for me to pitch in, a simple way to provide an unhoused neighbor with an ounce of dignity.

I have had numerous laundry buddies over the years, but my most recent laundry buddy has been my favorite. Each Wednesday I picked up laundry just after noon. I’d either greet my laundry buddy at the door to their cottage or the bag would be waiting for me outside the door.

You learn a lot about a person by doing their laundry. Do they methodically unball their socks before throwing them in the dirty laundry bin or are their socks a tangled mess? Are their clothes relatively clean or do they drip water and dirt as you pull them apart to put them in the washer? Is the laundry bag packed such that you can carry it to your car or is it stuffed to the brim with no thought given to your ability to lug it around?

My laundry buddy was methodical, clean, and tremendously kind. Each Wednesday afternoon I would wash my laundry buddy’s clothing, fold it and pack it back into the army green bag it always came in. I’d stock a Ziploc baggie care package with a pair of new socks, a few batteries, hand warmers, and home-baked goods, and set that on top of the clothing before securing the bag shut and returning it to the cottage.

Often, we’d see each other and chat. My laundry buddy followed what was going on with my kids, and always wanted to check how I was feeling, aware that I was a busy mom with an often hectic life. I followed my laundry buddy’s health chronicles — though eight years my junior, they were plagued by chronic health issues and I worried constantly about their condition and whether they were receiving the care they needed, a tall order for a poor person.

This week I learned that my laundry buddy had died.

Experiencing the death of an unhoused person is a raw, harsh pain because, to the vast majority of our community, their life was invisible and therefore holds very little value. But to me, I had such an intimate look into who this person was. I saw them — and their dirty laundry — every single week. I knew they unballed their socks and went gaga for homemade 7-layer bars. I knew they were kind and thoughtful and had a certain way of smiling with their cheeks. To feel this intimate pain of loss while simultaneously holding the awareness that this person’s life means so little to the community is deeply crushing.

Being of service to my laundry buddy was a blessing and a privilege. Entering the camp weekly for years on end, often with my now tween daughters in tow, provided fodder for conversations about suffering, privilege, poverty, and humanity. I had the opportunity to learn firsthand about the dimensionality of human suffering in my own community. This is a gift because in order to repair the suffering, we must first recognize that it is there.

I often wonder what homelessness would look like in our community if every person of means had a laundry buddy. The reduction of human beings to objects of frustration presents such an immense liability for humanity, yet we do this to our houseless neighbors every day — this is considered a socially acceptable practice.

What if instead, we opted to recognize that each neighbor that is different from us has a name, a face, and a story? What if we knew their favorite sweet treat or how they cracked a smile? What would tackling homelessness look like, and what would success look like?

Whitney Bowerman lives on Olympia’s east side, where she and her family host Olylightstravaganza during the holidays.