Winter weather hit Marysville and Arlington early this year, and those without a place to sleep found themselves seeking shelter.

The journey to homelessness can be a surprisingly short one.

Jacob Williams had to bed down at the Damascus Road Church in Marysville after he was no longer able to stay at the place he’d been renting.

For the family in the back room, that the church reserves for women and children, a succession of medical ailments and job losses rendered them homeless.

Rose Marie’s ability to work was impeded by knee surgery and treatment for a blood clot. She was already asthmatic and coping with pneumonia.

Her daughters Michelle, 23, and Jasmine, 19, each tried to support the family, but wound up losing their jobs due to chronic conditions of their own.

“I have a pinched nerve, plus the anxiety from my stress has given me muscle spasms, so I have an involuntary twitch now,” Michelle said.

Even Raphael, one of Rose Marie’s twin 12-year-old boys, broke his foot.

“We have relatives in the area, but we can’t stay with them because they have landlords,” Rose Marie said, while her husband slept on a mattress with the other men near the church’s front entrance. “It’s hard to slow down and take care of your children when you can’t give them a roof over their heads.”

Although the Damascus Road Church serves as the site for Marysville’s cold-weather shelter, several other churches contribute to its continued operation.

The Marysville Soroptimists recently contributed nearly $200 in supplies to the shelter, for cooking, cleaning and laundering clothes.

Shelter director Zoe Wlazlak and church coordinator Doug Brown both admitted that they’d been guilty of judging homeless people for their plight in the past, but as they enter their second year of operating the shelter, they expressed empathy for those who often have nowhere else to go.

“For many of them, bedding down at the shelter is the first time they’ve felt safe all day,” Wlazlak said to the Soroptimists at a recent meeting. “It’s more than just a bed that we’re offering them. It’s a connection to society that they don’t get on the streets. This isn’t just paper and plastic you’ve given them, but safety, warmth and fellowship.”

Brown recalled a man he’d met at the shelter, whose name he couldn’t remember, and when the man said, “It’s okay if you don’t know my name. I’m just a homeless guy,” it made Brown examine his own attitudes.

“We’re the same,” Brown said. “We’re both human. He just happens not to have shelter. We give someplace to sleep for the night, with two hot meals, but it means so much to them. We’ll hand them sack lunches in the morning, and one lady cried because we’d put a lollipop in hers. It’s a small thing, but it has a tangible result.”

The cold-weather shelter in Marysville is open seven days a week, from 7 p.m. to 7 a.m., on nights when the temperature drops below 32 degrees. It needs three people for each four-hour shift, including at least one woman per shift.

The cold-weather shelter in Arlington is likewise open from 8 p.m. to 7 a.m. when forecasts call for temperatures below 32 degrees for three or more hours.

However, as the program enters its sixth year, it has committed locations for only four nights a week, with the Immaculate Conception Church covering Sundays and Mondays, and the Arlington United Church covering Fridays and Saturdays.

Deena Jones, pastor of the Arlington United Church, explained that other churches still supply volunteers and goods, but have had to drop out of hosting the shelter due to remodeling and concerns about overlaps with their daycare programs.

“We’re usually only open for two or three nights in November, but we’ve already been open for a full week this year,” Jones said Nov. 19. “The rest of the winter weather predictions seem milder, but we got hit with a cold blast out of nowhere.”

After serving barely more than a dozen individuals in its first year, the Arlington cold-weather shelter held steady at serving around two dozen people each year following, until the winter of 2013-14, when that number skyrocketed to 74, including 58 men, 11 women and five children.

“The time commitment this requires from the churches and the volunteers is the hardest,” Jones said. “It doesn’t take a lot in finances, but we do have needs. Still, this is such a generous community that I almost hesitate to say what those needs are. The last time we put out a call for blankets, we were buried in them.”

When shelter volunteers request items such as gloves and socks, they send the excess to the Helping Hands thrift store for the needy.

“Of course, we can always use more folks to staff the shelters, to cook supper and breakfast, and to do laundry and wash the bedding,” Jones said, noting that the Arlington shelter also runs in four-hour shifts, and performs background checks on prospective volunteers. “We’re just trying to keep people from freezing to death.”

Call 360-403-4674 to check on the Arlington shelter’s location and hours of operation.

Log onto www.marysvillecws.org to do the same for the Marysville shelter.