it's sunday afternoon and i skipped church this morning and felt quite justified as i saw over the rhine last night in orlando. their music is rich worship. when i woke this morning, i entered the living room to find my mother in almost tears over our latest mailbox snapped in two; the top half on my breakfast table and the bottom half a spike still cemented in the ground ready to slay sky-diving vampires.
"why tears," you ask. two reasons.
one: all of my family members (both sisters, mom, dad, and myself) can cry at the drop of a hat for no identifiable reason at all. some say we're emotional wrecks with our bladder too close to our eyes and my shrink says it's because it's how god uses us to communicate. i'm going to choose to believe the latter because the first on makes me want to cry.
two: our mailbox saga has been an ongoing drama/trauma over the last few months. our first mailbox kept falling off of the pole. our mail man would open the box door and it would fall over backwards to the ground and our mail would go tumbling after. at first the mail guy was nice enough to get out of his car and place the box back on the pole and move on. in the last years of the mail box's life, though, he would just open the door, place the mail in and close it, then just let the mail box fall to the ground and he'd drive away. i thought it would be easier for him to just drive by our house and throw our mail on our driveway like the sunday paper and move on, but he never did. i watched this play out a couple of times from my front window and i felt sad for him that he had to deal with such incompetent civilians who can't even fix a broken mailbox.
the day came last month to 'raise the new barn' so to speak. my mother's ga-ga over country-like decor so she bought a red barn-looking mailbox for about $100 and we set it up, proud as could be, right where our old box would regularly get decapitated. it looked stellar.
until this morning. this morning it looked like weaponry from 'interview with the vampire' and all our effort had been snapped like a twig last night by some careless driver. i talked my mom off the ledge as she was pretty distraught that her would-be-neighbor-impressing mailbox was the latest victim of neighborhood hoodlums.
she went to the store and purchased a new post while i dug the old one up. she, my neighbors, and i toiled for about two hours until it was all complete. i dug this hole a bit farther back from the road so that drivers have more leeway in their drunken state, poor things. thankfully this all played out on a sunday when the post office is closed. it's all ready for tomorrow's delivery and when the postman comes and closes the mailbox door, he'll have no clue the drudgery involved in ensuring he can stay in his car this time.
