Mail's up

Recently I have been forgetting to check our mail. I’ll be halfway to work, and realize that neither myself nor husband-dear remembered to look in our mailbox the day before. Or on a Saturday night we’ll discover that someone made a dumb mistake somewhere, while the piece of mail has been in our mailbox since Thursday. This last Sunday, for instance, we found out that the county tax commissioner’s office suddenly decided we own two plots of land in a neighboring town and now owe them $500 in taxes. Let me assure you that discovering slightly disconcerting facts like that on a day when you can’t reach anyone is not conducive for a relaxing morning (After deciding we would just sell the land and retire off the money we felt slightly better though).

Anyway, I blame our forgetfulness about our mail on our mailbox. You see, at our old house we had one of those standard mailboxes: white pole, white box with a flap that always stuck when you opened it, and a little red flag. Everyone in our street had the same one, in the same place at the end of their driveway. And when you came home from work, you drove right by the bright white mailbox, so it was easy to remember to check for mail. Well, now that we have moved to a larger house, in a neighborhood with larger lots, the architects seemingly felt that all-white mailboxes would be too tacky. A nice house apparently has to have a mailbox that matches. In fact, I’ve discovered that this is a commonly-held belief in Georgia; the fancier the house, the fancier, and bigger, the mailbox. So instead of simply little metal boxes on poles, all the houses on our circle have large brick columns with the mailbox set inside them. The previous owners planted a small palm tree on one side of our column, and some purple flowers on the other side and it looks lovely. So lovely in fact that I apparently forget we have a mailbox in there at all. Many times I will find myself looking out at the front yard, and thinking how lovely it looks to have a brick column surrounded by plants at the foot of the driveway.

Besides causing me to forget we even have a mailbox, these mailbox-column-contraptions have also created another problem, at least for my neighbors: where do you put the stickers betraying your social/political/collegiate affiliation? In our old neighborhood, people would adorn their mailboxes with a whole array of ornaments, from Georgia bulldog stickers to Virginia Tech banners to little slipcovers for each season. You can’t do that when you don’t have a metal mailbox. Fortunately, some lucky soul came up with a solution to that problem as well. So a few of our neighbors have little red flags in the color of their favorite football team, or with a little “T’ for the Tennessee Vols at the end. Other people put a cover on the flap of the mailbox, or drill a hook in the side of their column for banners and other contraptions. The prize for creativity, however, is won by a family a little down our street. They have a two columns one on either side of the driveway, and both are adorned with a little statuette of a bulldog wearing a red sweater. While at first I thought this was just an example of people’s love for animals gone slightly overboard, I quickly learned that the statuette was supposed to resemble Uga (pronounced as “uggah”) , the official University of Georgia at Athens (UGA) bulldog.

Being Dutch, and far too down to earth for any such expressions, I have left our mailbox alone. Personally, I still marvel at the magic of the little red flag. I mean, when you think about it, isn’t it amazing that in this country you don’t have to wonder for miles trying to find a mailbox that hasn’t been removed or destroyed? All you have to do is put your mail in your mailbox, turn up the flag, and the postal worker simply picks it up for you. And because someone in the US Post Office has yet to acquire a recent street map, we are considered a “rural mail area”, which means that every month we get a little envelop in our mailbox which allows us to order stamps, which the postal carrier then delivers to our mailbox a few days later. So I don’t need any decoration to make my mail-experience special. It’s a miracle all in itself (whenever I remember anyway).