This weekend, V and I have been delivering flyers about the community effort to get the city to purchase a portion of the grounds of the former convent site for the creation/preservation of a public garden.
V and I took turns doing deliveries - sometimes accompanied by our daughter who would wait patiently in the stroller while we went up a mailbox and then came back to wheel her to the next house. Covering the few blocks we’d been assigned actually took a surprisingly long time – I guess I was imaging the distance of a city block, not the length of each person’s walkway and the delay of searching for mailboxes.
And this is what amazes me – in at least half a dozen houses I went to, there was no mailbox or mail-slot. Do these people not get mail? Does the mail carrier just drop letters on their doorstep? And is there a reason that people hide their mailboxes? In some instances I thought there was no mailbox, only to find it tucked against a porch pillar or between the screen and inner door. And so I realized that mail carriers don’t just deliver letters, they have to play hide and seek too.
Each winter (with this one being the exception) we get at least one ‘friendly reminder’ in our mailbox that our walk and steps need to be cleared of snow and ice. Last winter when I had a baby in my arms practically 24-7 I felt like posting a reply saying ‘I don’t mean to be inconsiderate. It’s just hard to shovel while breastfeeding’.
But now I have an appreciation for how dangerous it is to go up and down peoples walks and front steps. Very few people had cleared off the recent dusting of snow we had - meaning the ice underneath was hidden, but still treacherous. I didn’t fall, but came close a few times.
And so, having now experienced the mystery of hidden mailboxes and the danger of uncleared walks, I have a new admiration for mail carriers – and I promise to keep our mailbox in plain sight and our walkway cleared.
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