“I did a lot of foot care at the clinic… Of course, it had its Biblical roots, but there was something about foot washing that most people found comforting and even pampering…I knew that having your feet cared for could somehow make you feel better all over…Almost all the homeless patients I saw had foot problems. They had to walk around town to get to different agencies, meal sites, and day-labor pools. They walked in the rain and the snow and the heat, usually in ill-fitting, secondhand shoes with dirty, holey socks, and carrying heavy backpacks.”~ from my book Catching Homelessness: A Nurses Story of Falling Through the Safety Net, pp 86-87.
In this excerpt, I was referring to homeless patients I cared for when I worked as a nurse practitioner at the CrossOver Clinic in my hometown of Richmond, Virginia in the mid to late 1980s—over thirty years ago. But I could be (and indeed, am now) writing about currently homeless people and foot care here in my adopted hometown of Seattle, Washington.
There is this brief part of a haibun (prose mixed with haiku) reflection I wrote after helping with a foot clinic at ROOTS Young Adult Shelter in the University District near where I work: “Tonight in the homeless shelter a 19-year-old man from Georgia says, ‘My momma always told me not to go barefoot and I didn’t listen. That’s why my feets so bad. And I have to walk everywhere on them now.’ He reaches down and gently rubs his brown gnarled feet soaking in a white plastic basin. His feet are darkly scarred and calloused: the feet of an old man.
walking barefoot/we find our way/though cruel paths scar”
(From Soul Stories: Voices from the Margins, in the haibun/chapter titled “Where the Homeless Go”).
And there is this description of a foot care clinic I helped with at Mary’s Place, a downtown Seattle women and children’s homeless drop-in center: “The most delightful—and tender—foot clinic patient we had that morning was the petite three-year-old daughter of a young North African immigrant mother. The child pushed around a pink plastic toy shopping cart from the shelter’s playroom, and she wore a dress, bright striped tights, black Mary Janes, and a huge pink feather boa around her neck. She came and sat on a metal folding chair while one of the students washed her mother’s feet. The little girl wanted her own feet to be given the same attention, so her mother removed her shoes and tights. Baby toes! So cute!… I wanted to scoop her up and protect her from the traumas, the abuses of the world. But, of course, I knew I couldn’t do that. It made me sad to watch her toes curl up in delight as she splashed her feet in the basin of soapy water.”
(From Soul Stories: Voices from the Margins, in a chapter titled “Walk in My Shoes.”
And finally there is this King5 TV news report on the University of Washington School of Nursing foot clinic I helped with a few days ago (“UW Nursing Students Host Tent City Welcome Party” by Heather Graf, January 13, 2017). Rusty, the homeless resident of nearby Tent City 3 (currently on the UW campus), told the nursing student working with him that he had never felt so pampered. Small things go a long way. They always have and always will.
JOSEPHINE ENSIGN 