Tag: mail

Posted in Life

The worst mailbox in our neighborhood

Posted on by William Douthwaite

This mailbox has been bent, twisted, and zip-tied for over six months now. I pass by on dog walks and can’t help but wonder, “How is it still standing? Why haven’t the residents repaired it or straightened it up?” I tell myself, “I’m sure they’ll replace it soon.” But months have gone by and nothing has changed. Why not?

  • Those are hand-painted flowers decorating the side. This mailbox is one-of-a-kind. You can’t just go out an buy another one at Home Depot. It’s irreplaceable. It stays.
  • Maybe it’s not their house. “Not our problem.” Some tenants leave every repair to the landlord. And some landlords rarely come by the property to make repairs.
  • Perhaps a neighbor backed into it, nearly knocking it over. Or a stranger sideswiped it. Did a kid’s bike crash into it? Did an over-zealous mail carrier pull away too quickly? They broke it; they’re going to fix it!
  • This mail box is close to where a tornado touched down. It could be a testimony to the power of those winds. The storm came and went in a moment. But the memory of it remains.
  • I’m not sure anyone lives in that house. Some empty homes do not have a for sale sign out front. Maybe something happened to the person who lived there. Maybe he’s in the hospital, or worse, he’s dead.
  • Or, the people who bought this mailbox just aren’t that good at putting something together. Just about everything comes with assembly instructions. But not everyone is adept at following those instructions. So this is what you end up with.

All of the mailboxes in our neighborhood look different. Some are brand new. Others are weathered. Many stand straight and tall. A few, like this one, are precariously leaning. Very few actually look good out in front of a home.

But they aren’t going anywhere.

Posted in Christmas

Let’s do it. Let’s send out some Christmas cards.

Posted on by William Douthwaite
Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash

“Hey, thanks for your Christmas card. It was really great reading about your year.”

Two people said that to me yesterday. But in the past few weeks, as classes and meetings and activities have resumed, I’ve heard it from three other families. I had no idea that a Christmas card, along with a simple one page letter about our 2023, would bring a grateful response.

This past Christmas was the first time in seven years that my wife and I sent out cards at all. Back in the nineties, before social media, we sent out about forty or so each year, and received at least as many. It was the way to keep up with family and friends in the places where we had lived.

In time, the amount of cards decreased. If we hadn’t heard from someone for three or four years, we dropped them from the list. As our list of friends on Facebook grew, we already knew what was going on in everyone’s life, so a Christmas letter was redundant. Emailed cards and greetings replaces those delivered by the mailman. Our mailing list shrunk until we finally concluded, “Let’s not.”

This past year we met a lot of new people and made a lot of new friends. We wanted to and needed to strengthen our connection with them. However, we’ve retreated from the advertisement-ridden, spam-filled, and bot-controlled social media world. “Let’s do it. Let’s send out Christmas cards this year.” So what if we had only gotten about two-dozen this year? So what if we would send out a variety of left-over cards from years gone by? So what if first class postage costs a whopping $.66? We’ll enclose an illustrated letter about our year and see what happens.

Of the cards we received this year, only contained had a newsletter. It was three narrow-margin pages of single-space, small-font prose, with a blurry photo collage on the fourth side. It was the epitome of TL;DR (too long; didn’t read). I was in charge of the letter, so I was sure to include lots of white space, a few high res pictures, and the facts, just the facts.

Next we had to assemble our mailing list. We had very few. Some we could look up online. But most name and address searches want your money before they will give names and addresses. My wife sent off a few emails to the right people, and we got all the info we needed.

When we had them all addressed and ready to go, I waited in line at the post office for about twenty minutes to get some Christmas-y looking stamps. We got them in the mail on the last day for delivery before Christmas. Mission accomplished.

We’re thankful for this chance to cultivate new and old relationships. (Oh, and by the way, we send out cards with baby Jesus on them. Just sayin’.)