Neighbours

 I was going out to run an errand when I noticed my ground-floor neighbour's door was open, and since I hadn't said hello to her I called from the door, but she didn't hear, so I called louder and she came out of her kitchen and ran to let me in. Madame B is in her 80s, she rides a bicycle around, she is small and wiry and proud of it, and she is a talker, so I knew that I could give up on my errand, if I wanted to be back when Concepcion came to clean at 3 pm. 

The last time I saw her, last fall, we'd had a talk about keeping our shutters clean. I told her I always was amazed how clean hers were (at street level, so visible). Today she wanted to show me her shutters, the ones on the street that she'd cleaned recently. She said she kept all her old soiled kitchen sponges for jobs like that. She said she climbed up a ladder and then she stepped onto the window ledge (her ceilings are very high) and she cleaned them. I said it must have taken a whole afternoon to do them. She said, oh no, she'd done them in the morning, so nobody would see her, which she hastened to say was foolish, because really nobody would care if they saw her cleaning her own shutters, but still. She said she was going to do the courtyard shutters too, in the morning.