Two years ago the snowplow broke the post that supports the mailbox, and my dairy farmer neighbor Ray Churchill put it back together. "Don't buy a new post now. We can make this work for a year or two". Well, the post life expired this week.
Wednesday I got home a little on the late side, after dark. I pulled the car up where the mailbox should have been and it was in the snow, attached to the post which was broken off, right where the repair screws were. So I pulled the mail out, went inside, and called the Post Office to leave a message that once again I had no mailbox and would be in every Saturday morning to pick up the mail until the ground thaws.
Thursday morning I went outdoor to bring the mailbox out of the snow and saw something dark and strange on the driveway. Cow flop!! Cows had got out from somewhere and visited my yard, but that didn't explain the mailbox. After work I was bringing wood in and my road foreman neighbor Ray Peck stopped by. "I'm sorry about your mailbox. I'm keeping two Angus this winter for a friend of mine, electric fence doesn't bother them, and they've been getting out for weeks. They used your mailbox for a rubbing post." It also turns out they came up on his deck, and that was the last straw (cow flop on the deck!) so they're supposed to be going home this weekend.
That explained the mailbox. Today I drove to the Post Office promptly at 8 to pick up my mail. The women who deliver my mail were doing the sorting for the day's routes and we discussed my problem, because if I show up at 8 they won't have my mail ready. But Saturday they're only open until 10 and I can't get back there from Thelma's in time.
Postal rules are that mail must go in the box unless it is a package. However, the mail carrier has the option to leave "box" mail with a package, for instance, on the porch. Turns out that newspapers can be considered packages! So they will deliver my mail on Thursdays, when The Herald comes. Then they decided that they would just deliver the darned mail on Saturday regardless. "The boss isn't in on Saturday. You should get mail twice a week."
At 3pm there was a knock at the door: Claudia was on the porch, leaving mail. "You have a Netflix movie! We think that movies are packages too." This is the kind of thoughtfulness and friendship that makes living up here happy and worthwhile. We try to take care of each other.
This would make a great cartoon strip... I pictured electric-fence-resistant SUPER cows making a break for it to relieve themselves in your driveway, not to mention what they did with your mailbox post. And on top of that, you're trooping off to town to sort it all out with the local "package" carriers, only to wind up victorious in the end with mail delivery TWICE a week. Good for you Mama, keep fighting the good fight! Very little makes me glad to live in God-awful New Jersey, but for some reason after reading this, I do feel better today :-) Thank you, love -A-
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