Mailbox Trauma

I’ve had an absurd number of mailboxes.

We lived on a dark, rural road for many years. Sticking out on a curve against a wooded backdrop, our mailbox was a favored target of carloads of teens with baseball bats and nothing to do.

The first time one got bashed, I carefully banged out the dents with a rawhide mallet against a wood block. It looked pretty good. I’d minored in metalworking in art school. It was jewelry, only bigger.

The next attack left it beyond repair. We bought a new box, then nailed the beat up one to its wooden post, our ode to idiocy. It wasn't long before a second piece of battered metal graced the post.

My second grader wrote a story with her vocabulary words about our mailbox getting smashed. My husband wrote a song making fun of mailbox smashers.

I began painting them at random. I knew whatever I did would be temporary. I once painted the mailbox while my older child had a friend visiting. Her father missed our driveway three times trying to pick up his daughter, certain that he would have remembered a mailbox painted to look like the sky.

Development came to the area, and with it, traffic. A minivan got laid up against the mailbox after an ice storm. A crew burying lines dug up the one with flames and I got the county to make them rebury it. A school bus took out the black one with purple polka dots.

Then we moved once more to a quiet, rural road. The rusty metal mailbox was mounted on a tractor part. Both were painted white and peeling. I viewed it as an invitation. I spray painted the teeth of the tractor part in rainbow colors. The box itself became the sky. It stayed there for five years.

Sunday night, someone took out the mailbox. Unlike the beer drinking teens, this was an accident involving the girlfriend of a neighbor. She was rather upset. Her reaction?

“Oh no. I hit the coolest mailbox in the neighborhood!”

She dropped by a few minutes ago with a new box. Think I’ll buy some paint tomorrow.