The Thing About Mailboxes

I cannot believe I'm actually making an entire blog post about this. Good grief.

For me, part of the house hunting adventure brings out THE most random ideas and dreams. I'll think about something for a while and then think, well that was an hour of my life I'll never get back!

But I figure I could be doing worse things with my time, so why worry about that?

So today, I tell you about the mailboxes.

When I was a kid, I lived in the country. My parents have a couple of acres and our mailbox sat across the road from our driveway.

You may or may not know that my dad has had a radio program for the last 45 years. (Apple doesn't fall far from the tree, does it?) Back in those days (and WOW is this going to make me feel old), he sent out the program on reel to reel tapes. Do you even know what those look like?

He mailed them out to the radio stations that carried his program, and after they aired them, they'd mail them back. Each mailer contained 2 reels and the boxes were about 8 inches square and 2 inches thick.

As you might imagine, we needed a BIG mailbox.

Getting the mail often fell under the jurisdiction of my chores, so I'd walk alllllllll the way down the driveway (not as long as it sounds, but remember, I was a fat kid) and pile as many of those boxes into my arms as I could. Sometimes they piled so high, I could barely peer over the top to get them back in the house. (And we lived on a fairly busy highway, so that was fun.)

And on the days it rained, I was at the mercy of one of these:I would rest it on top of my head so I could still use both hands to carry tapes - and I could still see out. Brilliant.


Needless to say, when I moved out on my own, one of my favorite things about my house was the presence of one of THESE bad boys:
I could get my mail in my bathrobe if I wanted, because the only thing involved was opening the front door and peering out about two inches. I didn't have to put on boots in the winter. I didn't have to shovel a path. I didn't have to find an umbrella in the rain. Open door, retrieve mail.

I was in love.

So imagine my surprise when, the other day, I scoured the birds-eye-view map of a property I think I might love, and I noticed the mailbox was a good old-fashioned, by-the-road mailbox. And rather than a flood of memories of shoveling to get to the box...retrieving mail in the rain...getting dressed just to pick up the bills...I was actually excited.

Are you kidding me?

The thing is...mailboxes have come a long way since the days when the fat kid wore an umbrella on her head to pick up a pile of boxes.

They are now pieces of art waiting to happen: I can plant flowers at my mailbox!

Never mind that I have NO green thumb and flowers normally perish (painfully, I might add) under my not-so-watchful eye.

I can plant flowers at my mailbox!

So that's my new house ponderment for today. Please don't tell me I need a life. I know.