How long should a mailbox last?
Seems to me that it should last as long as the house — but ours didn’t.
This mailbox lasted 22 years. I installed it when we first moved in our house, on Thanksgiving day, 1987.
It became a much weaker mailbox about ten years ago, when a car removed it after a light snow.
Somebody (obviously not much of a snow driver) had put on the brakes, slid off the road, hit our mailbox, and continued pushing it down the street another hundred yards or so.
We didn’t see it happen, but we found the mailbox at the bottom of the street, in the middle of the intersection. The car’s tracks told the story.
I put it back in the ground, and for the past ten years or so, we’ve had a wobbly but functional mailbox.
I can’t remember when the numbers faded, but they haven’t been visible for many years.
Then, last week, my daughter — who got her drivers license a week ago — backed into it. That pretty much broke it.
My wife propped it up for a few more days with rocks, barely — until I had time, over the weekend, to get a new mailbox.
Looks nice, eh?
I put it a few feet in from the driveway — so even a really bad, drunk driver — should be able to back out of our driveway without hitting it.
Our new mailbox. A metaphor for…what?
Maybe we’ll get another 22 years out of this one. I hope so.
