You are not allowed to sit inside the laundromat because of Covid, your clothes and shoes are soaking wet because you spent the night on the river bank in a driving rain, and your socks are in the dryer. That's why you are on the bench in a downtown Owen Sound parking lot. A few months ago, even the public benches were closed.

October 10 is World Homelessness Day. While you are thinking about the public health directive to stay home and limit your Thanksgiving guests, some within our city limits are trying to figure out where they can get food and a blanket on a holiday weekend.

Without revealing the exact location, the tent in the picture above was not in a campground, but it was within a hundred feet of another Owen Sound parking lot full of SUVs, and a mid-range BMW. How long its residents are prepared to stay there depends, we expect, on the weather.

The bag of Kraft dinner and pasta is not garbage, nor was it dropped accidentally. It has almost certainly been left for those living at another of our local unofficial outdoor residences.

Until some public facilities re-opened during the pandemic, these people had no access to a public toilet. Or drinking water. Now the tent residents are only 750 metres from both – from 5 a.m. to 9 p.m.

Safe n Sound Homelessness Initiative on 8th Ave East was not open on World Homelessness Day. They are open Monday to Friday, 9 a.m. to 2 or 3 p.m. - funded for staffing only 30 hours of the 168 every week that people are homeless.

If you can find a pay phone or a willing phone owner, there is an emergency housing phone line that puts people up for a night or two in a motel.

The man outside the the laundromat has burned that particular bridge, so he says he will be sleeping by another. It didn't rain last night, but it went down to 3.2 degrees C.

World Homelessness Day. Thanksgiving weekend. Owen Sound, Ontario, 2020.