Mail Boxes

There's been some talk on the news lately of problems with the US Postal Service.  Some are blaming the mess on congress, others on Unions.  Still others say it has to do with witches or elves, and I'm hoping a ton of these folks go to the polls next year. 

We need a  Dorothy Party candidate, one like Glinda, the Good Witch from the North, to pull us out of the mess the other parties have gotten us into.  Heaven save us from the folks who have already declared they want to drive the bus.  The only road they know is the one that leads to a cliff beyond which is a 100 year deep canyon.  And all of them want us to go over that cliff at sixty miles an hour. 

While I was busy growing up, living at home with my parents, my mother loved to paint.  She'd spend hours at her easel with a brush in one hand and a pallet with two dozen different colors in the other.  One day she produced a small, I'd guess eight by ten inches, painting of a mail box.  To this day, I consider it to be the best she's ever created.

The mail box was located along side a red dirt road.  There was a red dirt path that lead from the base of the post that supported the mailbox to a small wooden sided house with a covered porch that extended the full length of the building.  Many chairs and a couple of swings were on the porch, and they overlooked the path with tall grasses on both sides...and the mailbox.

After a long day working in the hot, humid Alabama fields, fields so hot you started sweating just by looking at them, the folks would gather on that porch.  There they would sit and wait for any kind of breeze, even a warm one, to help cool down from the days labor.  The men would discuss the weather, the crops and what they needed to do the next day.  The women had different topics, but theirs too centered mostly on  what needed to be done to keep the family going.

Now there are some who would say the painting was of a southern cabin, and had nothing at all to do with the mailbox out in front.  But they don't know the story.  Even my Mom, who painted the picture, would tell you it's about the house.  But, when asked about the painting, her words said something different.

The mailbox was planted long after the cabin and porch were built, and after the fields were cleared by men wielding only shovels and dynamite.  And my Great Grandfather, who owned the cabin and the mailbox my Mother had painted from her most cherished of childhood memories, was proud of it.

Before the mail box was erected he and his wife would pick up what little mail that was addressed to them at the General Store in town.  They only went to town once or twice a month, and they'd even miss some months.  Not much mail back in those days; no credit card applications and advertisements trying to get you to buy the latest veg-a-matic. 

Mostly when a letter came it was bad news; someone you hadn't seen for a while had died or your property taxes had been raised.  Every once in a while something useful did manage to turn up, something like a Sears and Roebuck catalogue.  Pretty useful stuff, back in the day. 

My Great Granddad was a forward thinking man, when he had the time to consider such things, and was overjoyed when Rural Free Delivery came to the road that ran in front of his home.  He was able to recognize progress when he saw it, and was happy.  Happy for his family, who no longer had to wait for a trip to town to pick up the mail, happy for his community, who now could communicate with the outside world much more quickly, and happy for his country.  Things were looking up. 

With great pride he built the mail box in a shed behind his house, and he erected it with care beside that dirt road that ran in front.   He carefully painted the address, R.Rt. 5 Box 11, on it, and every day Great Grandma would go to fetch any mail that was deposited inside.  That all happened, according to my Mom, a little less than a hundred years ago.

I bought my first house in 1970.  I paid 16,500 dollars for a three bedroom, two bath house in a very nice neighborhood between Burien, south of Seattle, and  Tacoma, Washington.  There was no need to look very closely, the mail box beside the door was easy to locate.  Easy for me and for the mailman who brought the mail every day , except Sunday, and left it there for us.  All we needed to do to get our mail was step out onto our covered porch and pull it from the box.

Mail service in this country had certainly improved since my Great Grandfathers time; we no longer needed to walk a dirt path to get it.  For years this was the case, but then in the late 80's and early 90's things began to go downhill.  The three bedroom, two bath home we purchased in 1991, for WELL over ten times the price of the first one, came with a cluster of mailboxes located at the corner of the block.  We now walked a path, the sidewalk, much as my Great Grandfather did almost one hundred years ago, to get our mail.

It's been that way ever since.  Sure, there are some of you who live in houses built before the 90's who have your mail delivered to your door, but for the rest of us...well let's just say we can see how things are going in this country.

What's happened in this greatest land in all the Universe?  There's talk of cutting back mail delivery and even of no delivery at all.  How have things gotten so messed up that even mail delivery in this great nation is in jeopardy?

My Great Grandfather, if he were here, would shake his head.  Then he'd say, "The corn in the lower forty's ready.  We need to get it in by the end of the week."  He'd then advise all to get a good night's rest, say a few words thanking the Lord for the crop they were going to put in the crib during that week and go to bed.

He could take care of his own.  Didn't need a bunch of fancy dressed lying snakes in DC with well coiffed hair to tell him what to do.