The Hudson's Bay Blanket

So, you’re a social work student doing some sort of project with senior homeless women and you want to talk to me about my ‘experience’.  Well, isn’t that nice.  Now granted that I’m pretty dirty and I haven’t been to the esthetician for a while, but what makes you think I’m a senior homeless woman?  Maybe I’m just a ‘middle-aged’ homeless woman?  I know, it doesn’t sound as classy does it?

Oh relax. Just yanking your chain.  Might as well sit down.  You’ve got a pretty captive audience at the mission here.  Do you have anything to drink with you?  What’s in that thermos?  Tea?  Well first thing you should know is that if you want anyone to talk to you down here, you need to bring something a little more interesting than tea.  I’ll take a little though.

How old are you?  Twenty‐two?  You’re just a baby.  Oh don’t give me that look.  I thought I knew everything at 22 and turns out I knew dick all.   Anyway, you’re supposed to be asking the questions I suppose, so go ahead.

I carry everything with me in my shopping cart.  Everything I need to live is either in that cart or on my back.  I have an old Hudson’s Bay wool blanket that I found, in the dumpster behind one of the high rises. It was covered in matted dog hair, so I guess it was easier for them to throw it away than clean it.  I took a brush and worked on it for two hours and except for a little dirt, it was as good as new.  The blanket was great because it kept you warm even when it was wet.  Everyone said how lucky I was to find it. Yep, I’ve had my cart stolen before.  What a pain in the ass that is, because you’re starting from square one again. So you learn to keep what’s really important on you.  I have my butcher knife in this pocket, my little pot for Ramen noodles in this pocket.  Here, at my waist band, I keep this picture of my daughter Katie and her boy, see, I put it in this Ziploc bag and pin it there.

Here, I’ll show it to you.  See, they’re in her back yard.  Look how the sun shines through their hair.  My hair used to be golden that way.  They look so happy don’t they?  I think his name is Kyle. Yeah, I had a home and a family once with the white picket fence and the whole thing.  I was Suzy Homemaker, and my husband was an Engineer.  Stuff happens you know, people make choices and things creep out of control.  You start having a drink of wine in the afternoon to get through to the night and then start having a drink at night to get to sleep, and then next thing, here we are!  I don’t really want to talk about that part.  Just say I ended up here.   I get food from the food bank and the missions and places like that.  I don’t eat much.  People always give a little more food to a homeless woman than they do to a man.  Maybe they feel guilty about their mother or something.  I do a little panhandling so that I can get something to drink. 

A lot of the older guys will let you drink some of theirs if you give them a little hand‐job.  We’re all wearing too much clothing to do much else and they’re not really all that horny. (My goodness, you blush so easily, sorry kid.) Mostly though, they just want to have a woman to talk to.  Ladies aren’t like that.  We form our little group and we share what we can.

What’s the best thing I ever found?  Well last summer I was walking along the seawall and pushing my cart when I noticed a bright yellow something crashing up on the beach near the big rocksl.  At first I thought it was an inflatable dingy from one of the sailboats around here, but I realized that it was the wrong size.  I got a stick and when it came close enough, I managed to fish it out of the water.  It was pretty heavy.  I laid it out on the walk, people looking at me curiously as they walked by in their spiffy runners and windbreakers of florescent orange and green.  It turned out to be a yellow punctured air mattress that someone had thrown away.  One of the expensive ones too.  The material was thick and covered with some sort of cloth that was tightly woven.  The hole in it was too big to do anything about; like I would have a repair kit on me anyway, but that didn’t matter.  My first thought was that it would be really good for keeping dry on the ground and keeping the rain off my stuff in the cart.  I rolled it up and hid it under some bags of rags so no one would notice it and try to take it.  I went up into the park and found a sunny spot where I laid it out and I rested in the sunshine for a while. I was pretty happy.  It was like winning a prize. I loved that thing.  It fit just perfect over all the stuff on my shopping cart and kept everything dry like nobody’s business, and when winter came, I doubled it up on the wet ground and with my Hudson’s bay blanket, I was so warm, I can’t tell you.  Everyone said how lucky I was.  On really cold days I would let some of the others sit on it to get some relief from the wet.   What people don’t realize about living under a bridge is that the rain gets blown from the side, the ground and all that water from the street has to go somewhere.  So it sneaks under the roadway and runs down the hill under the bridge.  I have to have something to help keep by butt dry.  Arthritis you know.

Do I still have the mattress?  No.  It’s gone.  It’s not a nice story kid.

Okay.   Well you know there’s a lot of little girls and boys downtown nowadays? They make their living in the usual way, and some of them panhandle.  They sit in their in their baggy torn jeans wearing those crazy knitted caps and beg from the office people in their tan trench‐coats with their giant golf umbrellas as they hurry by.  The kids tell me they get quite a bit.  Maybe the office people figure they’re buying some sort of Karma insurance against having their own kids end up down here.  Last winter was really cold and a bunch of kids started hanging around our area of the bridge.  We told them to go somewhere else, but the only other place was where the old guys were and a lot of them aren’t too nice especially to the young ones.  So we let the kids share our fires and they actually brought us food and some other little treats like chocolate. 

There was a girl named Marilyn that the rest of them seemed to take care of.  She was kind of sick and didn’t leave the fire much.  They would bring her extra food when they could.  She would sit there wrapped up in her  coat and smile at them when they came back with something for her.  I watched her shiver and if the others weren’t around, I’d let her use my blanket.  She had a nice smile. Marilyn never talked much and frankly I never asked her how she got there because unlike some people, I keep my business to myself and they can keep theirs.  I don’t want to know everyone’s sob story because mostly it’s the same old crap anyhow, and I got enough of my own crap to deal with.  This one day though, it was really cold and raining and I decided to go to the Sally Ann to see if I could get that kid some extra food, or maybe some free socks or mittens that they sometimes give out.   Trudy was tending the fire, so I said, “Hey Trudy keep an eye on things while I get some food for the kid!”  She flapped her hand at me to tell me she heard me and off I went.  I left my cart parked by  Marilyn  ‘cuz for some reason I figured I could trust her by now.

When I got back, the cart was still there, but the air mattress and the Hudson’s bay blanket were gone.  I was pissed; I was fit to be tied.  “I screamed at Trudy, “Where’s my stuff.”

“Fuck off, I was getting stuff to burn in the fire.  Keep track of your own shit.”  That’s the answer she gave me, useless bitch.    I got out my butcher knife and I told Trudy that I was going to find that little whore and slice her open like a squirrel.  Trudy calmed me down a little, but then she said “Well why the hell did you go leaving your stuff with her anyway?  What did you expect?” That took some of the acid out of my piss.  Trudy was right, it was my own fault.    I figured that I wouldn’t see either object ever again, because if Marilyn didn’t keep them, she would trade them off for something else.  I sat by the fire and my cart on a piece of plastic and shivered, cursing my own stupidity. It was getting dark when one of Marilyn’s friends came running up to us as we sat by the fire. I jumped up and grabbed the little shit by the scruff of the neck “Where’s that little bitch?” I hissed at him and I held my knife under his throat just to let him know I meant business.

He didn’t even notice the knife, he just looked up at me and said, “Please come!” He was wild eyed and scared and panting.  Something had really spooked the kid. “What’s up?” Trudy asked.

The kid shook his head. “Please just come”.

I told Trudy to stay with the stuff- and pay attention this time - and I would go with the kid.  He led me down the hill away from the bridge to where there’s a little copse of trees.  He led me through an overgrown path to the centre of the bushy undergrowth. The ground was almost dry and hardly any rain was getting through. I found Marilyn, and my air mattress and my Hudson’s bay blanket.  She was lying on the mattress with the blanket wrapped around her shoulders.  She was shivering and half naked.  The mattress was covered in blood and piss and shit and a little something else that had come much too early to live.  I knelt beside her and she opened her eyes.  The dark circles on her eyes made them seem bigger and bluer than possible in her thin white face.   Is this getting to be a little much for you dearie?  I noticed you haven’t been writing anything for a while.  Should I finish?

Ever watch an animal die?  No?  Well, I hit a deer once back in the day when I still had a car and when I got out and went over to it, it wasn’t quite dead, but its back was broken.  I knelt beside it to try and figure out what to do, and it died.  I watched its eyes as it did.  The life was in them, and then it was gone, simple as that.  I remember thinking at the time that I had never really believed how much life shone in someone’s eyes until I saw it leave. I watched the life leave Marilyn’s eyes. She turned to marble as I waited for the kid to bring me a plastic sheet from the cart.  I wrapped her in it and put her back on the yellow mattress in her used needle and condom bower. I tucked the plastic in at the sides, and the brushing of my hands over the yellow vinyl sounded like whispered prayers.  I left the yellow mattress, but I kept my Hudson’s Bay blanket.

I love that blanket.