fear and clothing at the swish and swirl

Stack upon stack of washers and dryers sat harboring who knows what within, whirling the filth away to someplace else under cover of sanitized lighting. The sun had set, and Sherri moved like a ghost through the lonely motions of folding her clothes. One black t-shirt followed the one before, then another, followed by another. As I watched her repeat the movements with her arms, the pile of tees grew from four, to seven, to twelve ... but each shirt she folded was exactly the same.

There in the laundromat, amidst the stainless steel and sloshy scent of Tide's jasmine rain, we talked about how the recession had wrapped its long fingers around her.

Sherri's husband was a cabinet maker. As last year's housing market began to disintegrate, dragging with it the trades, the outfit for which her husband worked was hit hard. Sinking fast, his employer began ejecting assets, and soon Sherri's husband found himself the jetsam of an economic collapse he had no part in creating; and just like that, with the approach of Christmas, he was without work.

Without warning, Sherri's part time job in a downtown cafe--supplemented by her husband's modest unemployment check--became the foundation of their self-sufficiency. They moved into a two-room boarding motel where they pay $380 a week. As Sherri's husband struggled to find work, any work, Sherri kept at her $10 an hour, 25-hours-per-week position. "They are good to me there," she commented. "After the food has sat for three days, they have to throw it out. Now they give it to me." 

"What sort of food do you you get?" I inquired.

"Oh, you know, bread, rolls, soup ..." she thought a moment: "muffins." That's when I realized why all the shirts she was folding were the same: they were all from the cafe.

She paused before continuing. "Last month my husband's unemployment insurance ran out." Sherri had for several minutes been folding, unfolding, then folding again the same shirt. I had just asked if I could take her photo, when she suddenly gave up on the shirt she had been compulsively folding and blurted out, "My check isn't even $200 a week ... how am I going to pay $380 for our room?" She took off her glasses for the shot, wiped her eyes, and tried to smile. But she wouldn't look at me. "I'm 50 years old, and the way things are going, there isn't going to be any social security when I'm too old to work."

She went on to mention that they had medical bills in collections, that their belongings in storage were set to go to auction in a couple weeks because their payment was two months past due, and that their car now sits idle for want of gas. Then finally she looked at me: "I'm scared."