By: VTPenner
It’s thirteen degrees, it’s dark, and I’m cold. No. Change that. It’s very dark and I’m very cold. I just finished re-shoveling a thirty foot long path from my front porch steps to those of my closest Barre City neighbor. You see, Mr. Postman, our neighbor is a nice, single young lady who is just fine with the idea of us shoveling a path across our lawn to her steps. The sole reason for doing this, being, that you can deliver her mail, and then come across the lawn to deliver ours, with as little inconvenience to yourself as possible. The granite steps up our steep front lawn are in bad shape, and you know that’s so from trying to get up them even on warm dry days. But now you can simply walk right across the lawn in winter, exactly as you do every day in summer. (Ah… summer! Just the thought of it makes me want to go plant something.) Anyway, until last week’s big snowstorms, you, or whomever was doing your mail route, took our little lawn path every day
The problem, and also the reason I’m frozen and out of breath, is that, even with the little yellow brick road we made for you, (No it isn’t brick, but parts are yellow, at least after Emily’s Pekingese has been out.) is that we haven’t actually received any actual mail in our actual mail box, for several actual days now. All this reminds me of one cold and snowy day of my childhood in Maine. School had been cancelled, and my Mom asked, well, told me to shovel the path to the front door before the mailman got there. I did exactly as she asked. Well, the truth is, I did vaguely what she asked. I shoveled a clean but narrow serpentine path, which wound it’s way all over our front lawn before ending at our front steps. I then waited patiently at the dining room window, just to see if our mailman would walk the winding path to our door. Do you know something? He actually did it, which made me very pleased. Do you know something else? My mother was not very pleased at all. So, Mr. Postman, please appreciate the fact that, although my mother now lives in Florida, and is not here to see the types of paths I shovel, I always make a straight and shortest-distance-between-two-points one just for you.
Yes, Mr. Postman, I’m sure the snow tonight is the deepest it has been in Central Vermont in many years. I am also sure that the U. S. Post Office motto long ago changed from “Through snow, sleet and dead of night.” to something concerning going ‘postal‘, but I still need my mail. I just don’t know what else to do to get you to deliver it, but I am willing to try whatever you might suggest. Maybe I could move my mailbox, and attach it to my neighbor’s house. Then you wouldn’t have to walk across the lawn, and I wouldn’t have to shovel it for you. I don’t mind trudging through the snow once a day to get the mail. Oh, I forgot, I can’t move the box. My mailbox, which I picked out, paid for, and screwed to the front of my house all by myself, is property of the federal government… sort of. I found that out years ago, when my wife tried to put Avon books in a few mail boxes around town. Naughty, naughty, Lorna.
You know, Mr. Postman, I was pretty cold out there, and I’m sure you get cold too, every single day of winter. And, do you know something else? All you ever bring me is bills and offers to sell me stuff or make me rich. I hate opening the bills, and NEVER open the offers for things to buy or to make me rich. I guess I don’t want to be rich bad enough to read all that garbage. So, why don’t you just skip my house, as you have been doing anyway, and keep whatever you were going to leave in my, I mean in the federal government’s mailbox which is screwed to the front of my house. Maybe you can buy some stuff or become rich instead of me.
Ha, Ha. I want you to know that tonight is the night after I wrote the story above. Tonight is also the night I first met our mailman. Just moments ago I was snow blowing the huge snow bank at the end of our driveway, which was deposited there by a passing sidewalk plow just to block us IN. There I was again, out in the coldness and darkness. I looked up from the blower and noticed our mailman trying to get up through the huge mountain of snow the sidewalk plow created in front of our steps just to block him OUT. I took my mail from him, so he wouldn’t have to hire a helicopter to get over the bank. You know, our postman turned out to be really nice, and insightful enough almost to be a relative. Ha, Ha. Again. I knew we were on the same wavelength, as he momentarily stood there shivering with me, surrounded by countless tons of snow, and said he was going to send Al Gore his next heating oil bill. What a guy! So, forget all that other stuff I said.
