Tales of a Country Mailbox

Image Gallery On a country road, the author's mailbox becomes a matter of personal pride. ILLUSTRATION: MOTHER EARTH NEWS STAFF

By some provenance or other, I have always inherited a mailbox when moving into a new place, needing only to change name tags before resuming my swim in the postal stream. As a result, I have taken these receptacles completely for granted. But no more. Alone in the woods, the yellow brick house I recently occupied sits just off a county road. Since no mailbox came with it, I contented myself with driving to town (or townlet, as I like to call it) five miles each day to pick up the mail, drink a coffee at the crossroads and tap into local news and the latest gossip.

I had hardly entered into this rural American ritual when it came to an abrupt halt. For while handing me a sheaf of welcome-to-the-area utility bills one morning, the postal clerk cleared his throat. "You've got thirty days," he announced, as though imposing sentence. "The postmaster says you can't come in for your mail anymore. You've got to put up your own box." Stung, I reeled out the door and headed for the local discount mart.

My zest for country life returned when, among the preposterous new plastic mailboxes on the shelf, I also found the traditional, galvanized-tin version, the kind that made rural America great, or at least recognizable. While I debated whether the big, silver RRD 2, as it is called, could hold the torrent of mail I expected, a young woman reached in front of me for a black RRD 1, the smallest and cheapest available. "This is the third one in a month," she fumed, tossing the box into her cart. "Teenagers. The new game around here is to knock of mailboxes with cars. They've learned to nick the posts with the bumper so they can kick the box over but not scratch their car, God forbid. Who knows what they'll do next," she ended, scarcely more than a teenager herself.

Arresting piece of local color, I reflected, suddenly grateful to the evil postmaster for having forced me into what I now saw to be a vital cultural eddy of its own, one that swirled around the freestanding mailbox with all the force of gravity. Actually, I had already become intrigued upon reading the mailbox guidelines thrust at me, along with my bills, by the postal clerk. I found, for example, that erecting a box that resembled a person was strictly forbidden. Shucks. There went my notion of a gargoyle in the likeness of the postmaster general himself. Sensibly, I settled on the midsize model, RRD 1 1/2, and shifted my energies to installation and lettering.