Postal Predicaments

“Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds.” (Found here.) But your house? Well, your house is just too far to drive to.

We don’t have a mailbox. We don’t get mail delivery to our house. But we get a free PO Box since there is no mail service.

The tiny Bickleton Post Office was shut down without warning this past spring—we hear it’s because some federal official came by and discovered that there was no bathroom for the single employee in the building. When it was shut down, they moved all the mail to the next closest post office 25 miles away. So Bickleton residents, and those on its outskirts, had to add 25 miles to their drive for their mail. After residents rightly put up a fuss, the mail was delivered to the PO Boxes in Bickleton again. Now the residents are waiting for the post office itself to reopen.

And that was the status when we were looking into living up here. Just before we came, we got the good news that the Bickleton Post Office was reopening the Monday after we moved in. Hurrah! I wouldn’t have to live in a place so desolate that not even the United States Postal Service could touch it.

Monday Morning: no sign of life in the post office building. So we drove the 25 miles to the closest post office. The woman working there was the regular Bickleton Post Office employee.

No, no, she told us. Our informant had been wrong. The new PO was opening the following Monday. And could we wait till then to open our PO Box?

A week with no mail—not even a place for it to be sent to? Um, no thank you. (What would she have done if it was months until the new PO opened?)

We compromised. She told us our new PO Box address so we could do a change of address, but we would have to wait for the keys until next Monday when she opened the new PO at 8:30 a.m., and we should be warned that she would be swamped with customers since she’d been shut down for so long.

The Next Monday Morning: Eli was back to work so Ivy and I were alone with the task of getting to the PO. It’s a half a mile there and back, which will be an easy walk in good weather. But with the wind, cold, ice, and snow of early December, there was no way I could make the walk with a toddler in tow. So we bundled up with coats, hats, boots, and gloves and got strapped into the car for our drive to the PO.

And no one was there. It was a little past 8:30, but to give her the benefit of the doubt, I drove around town for a bit (not that it takes long to see the entire town). There was a dog that insisted on resting in the middle of the road and staring at me as if I were intruding on his private space, but still no sign of life or business at the new PO.

We drove back home, got out of the car and unbundled, and I tried calling the Bickleton PO. No answer. Next I called the PO 25 miles away. The Bickleton Postmaster answered. The PO would not be opening that day, but I could go by while she was there after 11:00 to pick up our key. By then she should have gotten a hold of the woman who used to have our PO Box and get the keys from her.

(Um, excuse me? We’ve been sending our mail to a PO Box that someone else has a key to? – The problem with a small town is that you can’t get upset at the people you deal with every day, because you will be dealing with them the next day and the next and you’ll see them at the market and the tavern and the church.)

She was there as promised with keys in hand, and had even brought our mail inside so I didn’t have to walk across the icy street with my toddler to get it out of our PO Box. The whole experience has been a weird cross between being frustrated with nothing being done in what I consider the usual way and being surprised by the little acts of kindness that are unusual in the world I come from.

So we can get our mail now. But what about packages? Without a PO to hold them behind the counter, packages represent their own problem.