March 24th, 2017

Do you remember when all mail came by postal delivery to your house or apartment?  The mailman who, with that huge leather bag slung over his shoulder like Santa Claus, walked up and down the streets helping us communicate with friends and family far away? Or maybe you lived in the country and your mail was delivered by a postoffice car or truck. It was a time when people wrote letters and postcards as way to stay connected?  Phone calls were prohibitively expensive back then, especially long distance calls. It was a perfectly ordinary thing to sit down and write a letter. People owned pretty pens and stationary was a perfectly acceptable gift. 

"The mail must go through!" was the motto of the Pony Express.  "Neither snow, nor rain, nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds" is the creed associated with the US Postal Service.  Although not an official motto, it is inscribed on the James Farley Post Office in New York City facing Penn Station. The phrase was borrowed from the ancient Greek, Herodotus who was referring to the courier service of the even more ancient Persian Empire in 500 BC.  Mail was a big deal back then. Suffice it to say, even nowadays with electronic mail, regular actual paper postal mail is still important to us. 

It was one of the nice surprises when we moved here. Having our own personal, right-in-front-of-our-own-house postal mail receptacle. Where we lived in Colorado, the norm has come to be cluster boxes.  While they do the job, sometimes it was a real pain to have to slog 17 houses up the street to our post box, remember which unit it was in and which box in which unit and then slog back. Especially annoying in rain or snow/ice.  This is how they do cluster boxes on the island

While biking and walking around the island, I was surprised to see that not everyone had mailboxes out by the road for the drive-by postal delivery person.  Some people still had the receptacle by the door type which tells me that there is at least one postal person who still walks a delivery route here.  Do you remember that type of mailbox?  It looks like this:

I should not have been surprised to see all the unique mailboxes here.  The houses are all very different, why should the mailboxes be any different?   Some people just are so terribly clever, they express themselves, they say a little something about who they are with their mailboxes.  Like, maybe, I am an animal lover

Or maybe sometimes they say, "Flowers make me happy" or "I am a gardener" or maybe it's a dire warning, "Beware the flowers" I don't really know for sure, but I still liked seeing the many variations:

Others had more of a "beachy" or nautical theme. After all, look where we all live!  Celebrate where you are, I suppose, is their thought, or maybe it's a consistency thing :

Some people are clearly more about security.  Or maybe they have had problems with people knocking over their mailboxes in the past. Again, I'm just throwing ideas out there, but when there is a clear theme,I can only surmise. Solid, strong and safe, nobody is knocking these babies over.  They are more like bunkers than mailboxes:

Sometimes, it's not about the mailbox itself.  It is, apparently, more about the mailbox post.  Perhaps the uniqueness is the material the post was created out of really caught my eye or maybe it's all about the design :

Some people seem to prefer a "rustic" look:

Others have a more futuristic leaning.  These reminded me of the Jetsons. I'm not sure why:

And then there are the folks who are all about colour!  These were probably the most fun.  Toodling down the road seeing these just makes me smile.  In a world of things that are all the same, ordinary, boring and bland, these are anything but:

And inevitably there are the people who want it all, uniqueness, futuristic and colourful.  This was one of my favourites:

And, as always, there are traditionalists.  Traditional, but still charming in their own way:

There were a few I could not categorize.  One that was just adorable:

And another that is just the mac-daddy of all seaside mailboxes.  Odes should be written to this one.  It should be serenaded every night and confetti thrown at it daily:

In case you are wondering, ours is traditional, boring, plain with about a zillion reflectors on it.  Our first mailbox was also traditional but pretty and within the first month, someone driveby'd it. Yup, they smashed it to smithereens taking out our mailbox and leaving behind their sideview mirror.  Tim was so incensed that he swears if it happens again, ours will be the bunkerbox. 

Hope you enjoyed this  little celebration of all things postbox and that one day soon, instead of ads and bills you find something wonderful and unexpected in your mail receptacle regardless of what sort it is.