Why I Love Our P.O.

The town snow plow sheared off the front of our mailbox the other day.  We haven't been able to replace the mailbox because the post on which it rests is buried in a mountain of snow, so we have been getting our mail at the village post office.

The other day the postmistress saw us park in front of the post office and she ran outside.  "Nothing very exciting for you today, I'm afraid," she said, handing the mail to my husband.

One day a couple of years ago, we were waiting for some overdue meds to arrive in the mail.  The postman delivered before 10 a.m., and the meds hadn't come.  In the afternoon, we called the postmistress to ask if they had arrived so we could pick them up, but they hadn't.  At 4:30 p.m., post office closing time, our phone rang.  It was the post mistress. The package with our prescription had just come in, and her assistant would be glad to bring it to our house on his way home.

To someone who can still remember the dread of dealing with the P.O. in our nation's capital--where the employees would just as soon spit in your eye as sell you a stamp--our local post office is a kind of miracle

Even miracles have their dark side, however, and the dark side of our little post office is its hours, which are as follows:  Mon-Fri 8:00am-12:00pm,  1:30pm-4:30pm.  One wonders why a post office would close at lunch time, the very hour when working people have the opportunity to run errands.  And if you have post office business to transact on a Saturday, you'd better get up early and make sure your driveway is plowed:  the P.O. closes at 10:30.

In every aspect but the physical (the post office building is anything but picturesque) ours is a kind of postcard post office, a relic of the Norman Rockwell version of Vermont that you can still catch glimpses of  here and there, along with the occasional moose and the elusive catamount.