Mailboxes and Roses
When I got to my mailbox at the end of my daily walk down the mail-path, there it lay, bang in the wet grass by the road. “Rats,” I thought, “somebody’s bumped into it and knocked it down.” But the mail lady told the postmaster that it had come away in her hands, the post rotted off flush with the ground. This was a special post that I’d put up myself, sturdy and braced, and it had lasted 15 of the 40 years the mailbox has been there. But I hadn’t sealed it in concrete, and the ever-present rain and rot finally got to it below the grass line.