Water by the gate

They stand by the gate of each building with a bag on their back and a phone in their hand, in heat that has not broken even after dark, until someone upstairs comes down or buzzes them in. Some wait ten minutes. There is nowhere to sit, and nobody has thought to offer water.

Part of this is easy to fix, and fixing it is a small pleasure. Turn on the light over the entrance so the building number can be read. Please do.

Part of it looks easy because it seems to need only a message. A polite note in the residents' group asking everyone to come down quickly. If a note were enough, this would have been settled long ago.

And part of it is vast. The way the whole trade is arranged, the hours, the heat itself. Too big for one building, which is a quiet comfort: nobody is blamed for failing at the impossible.

The part that matters sits between them. A cooler of cold water and a bench in the shade by the gate. Nothing has to be invented. Someone has to raise it in the group, sit through the neighbour who worries about strangers lingering, agree who refills the cooler, and keep refilling it in the second month when the novelty has worn off.

None of that is hard to understand. It is hard to do, because it asks for nerve, patience with people, and a dozen households agreeing on something small and then keeping to it.

The bench costs almost nothing. What it asks of the building is the expensive part, and it is waiting by the gate every evening.