The Elevator Was Out

February twenty-seventh. My neighbor knocked on my door at six-forty Wednesday evening with the expression of a person who has just done math they didn't want to do. The elevator had been out since noon. She had four flights of laundry. I had plans that amounted to heating up soup and watching whatever was next in my queue, which meant I had no plans.

I want to say I volunteered immediately and gracefully. The honest version is that I stood in the doorway for about three seconds, looked at the bags, looked at her, and said 'okay, yeah.' That was the full extent of the negotiation. We made four trips. By the third trip I had reorganized the load twice and developed real opinions about which bag should go on which shoulder, and she was very patient with me about all of it. At one point I set everything down on the second-floor landing to catch my breath and laughed at nothing in particular, which she was also very patient with.

Reorganizing the load on the ground floor because the first arrangement was optimistic

The thing about doing a small favor, the kind that costs you one hour and some arm strength and nothing else, is that it has this quality of returning more than it takes. I walked back upstairs afterward and ate my soup and felt unreasonably fine about everything. The apartment was the same apartment. The evening was the same evening. Something had just happened in it that hadn't happened before, which is apparently enough.

Trip three of four. Arms: fine. Optimism: diminishing.

I've been sitting with the 'between-itches' feeling lately, that post I wrote in January about what it's like when nothing is pressing, and I think Wednesday was a good answer to it, even if it wasn't an answer I went looking for. Sometimes the thing that fills the patient space is just a neighbor's knock at six-forty. That seems about right.