Tourist season theater

This is a job Judy used to do

     I scored a plum job at the spring cleanup of  the library beach cottage in Manzanita.   We are supposed to clean for 6 hours, which is difficult for me to do in one day. I get creaky.  My usual strategy is to claim the stand-up jobs like washing windows and cleaning the pantry.  This year the organizers offered me a task that  is fitting for my status as  by far  the oldest cleaner.  I got to do the laundry.  
    Sue and I stripped the 11 beds of quilts and sheets and mattress pads and  bed skirts.  We took down the curtains and liners and took up the bath mats.  We emptied the trunks of the spare comforters, loaded everything into the Prius, and headed to the laundromat. It is a large, clean place with marigolds and Russian sage planted along the front walk.  Sue was relieved to see that we were the only ones there on a Saturday morning.  She knew we wanted to monopolize the machines.
    We propped the front door open to keep the place cool, and  filled all the tall  stainless steel washing machines with  our dirty linens.  Sue is much shorter than 5 feet tall, so she had to stand on tiptoe and stretch up  to pour the powdered soap into the slots on top of the machines.
     Four hours later we were still waiting for the heavy comforters to get completely dry.  We tried putting only one item into each huge dryer.  Sue cleaned every lint filters over and over again.  Still, there were damp spots.  I thought that the quilts would surely get dry outside in the sun and the coast wind.  I hauled chairs outside, and draped comforters over them.  Then I wheeled one of the carts outside with a quilt hanging from its upper rod.  I gave up on that idea when the comforters blew off the chairs and the cart started rolling across the parking lot.
    Just as I had returned the chairs  to their exact homes in front of the coffee table with magazines arranged in precise lines, a woman bustled in from a side door.  "This open door is making a wreck of my heat upstairs, "  she said, not looking at us, and she closed the front door.  The she proceeded to unlock a closet, get out a broom and dustpan, and start sweeping the floor in front of the first row of washing machines.

Runaway quilts

    "Soap all over the floor, there's soap all over the floor.  What did you do, pour it out?"  She kept on just loud enough for us to hear, but still not looking at us.  She swept all over the large room, including under our feet, talking all the time while, not looking at us.  Then she got out a mop and started mopping.  "This soap will never come up, and I just painted this floor, too."   The woman swept and mopped and muttered for almost 30 minutes.
    Sue explained that she couldn't reach the soap dispensers on top of the machine, that she looked for a broom but couldn't find one.
 "I lock them up, or  they steal them," was the reply, still with no eye contact.
     It was a fine piece of theater in Manzanita, Oregon, permanent population 601.   It  made me remember the bumper sticker that I have seen on cars at the coast, If it's tourist season, why can't we shoot them?