The Joy of Neighbors

I've explained the concept of Kehrwoche before - we have to clean the landing and the stairs down to the next landing in the common stairwell of our apartment building. We do this every second week, alternating with our neighbors.

Lots of people (including myself) are not very diligent about remembering Kehrwoche. But my husband, being the good Schwab that he is, always remembers Kehrwoche. The Saturday we got married, we came home from our reception at 4:30 a.m. on Sunday morning and Marc did Kehrwoche.

And having lived here for 1.5 years, we have never seen/heard our neighbors do the Kehrwoche on their week. And on the Sunday after their Kehrwoche, it doesn't look so clean. But being the trusting people that we are, we just take it for granted that they do it most of the time.

Well, last weekend, we had Kehrwoche. And as Marc was faithfully cleaning the stairwell, he found some powdery substance under the neighbors' doormat. Now, we've heard stories of neighbors putting threads or powder under their doormat to check that the others are doing their Kehrwoche, but we really thought these were a type of urban legend.

Well, not any more. It's happened to us personally. Take a look...

So, what do you do when something like this happens? Just clean it up and throw it away. Oh no, not Marc. He wanted them to know that we knew what they had done. So he made a little pile and left it in front of their door.
It was the neighborly thing to do, right? Maybe they lost it and were looking for it and didn't think to look under the mat. Or maybe they can use it again in two weeks when we're back on for Kehrwoche.

And cleaned the rest of the stairwell so loud that the whole house must of known that we do Kehrwoche!