Laundryroom Swapmeet

So I live in an apartment building. We have a communal laundry room on the first floor: four washers, four dryers, buck-a-load. Standard stuff.

We’ve also got a wall-mounted mailboxplex, a fusebox, a couple of glazed windows out to the street (which is on an incline, so that the further west you move in the laundry room, the farther underground you get), a plastic-tub sink, a corkboard (where folks put up little advertisements and handclipped cartoons), and a table.

The table, in particular, is important.  This is the table:

A naive person might call this the folding table.  That’s why we call that person naive—while I have, on rare occasion, seen clothes resting or even being actively folded on this table, that is only a happy accident, a matter of convenience.

This is not a folding table.  It is a laundryroom swapmeet.  Things appear—see the photo, above!—and later disappear.  The table is an auction house, and in this auction everything is free and no one knows who put the item up for collection, nor who eventually dares to raise their placard and claim that prize.

This is the table where it all happens.  This is the swapmeet.