Yesterday morning, I noticed something laying in the driveway. I couldn’t tell what it was from the house-it sort of looked like a book. Because it wasn’t blowing around, I waited a little while before going out to investigate. Then I noticed the police car driving slowly into the neighborhood. I didn’t think much about it because they do occasionally patrol our streets. Not often and not since we settled the problem with the jerk running his heavy equipment through our neighborhood to get to his piece of property in another county. Yeah, dude, use your own driveway for that crap. I digress. The cop was in the ‘hood for a reason.
As it turned out the thing in our driveway was the door to our mailbox. Great. The first night after school lets out and redneck boys have nothing better to do than ride around whacking mailboxes. Isn’t that so 1981? Around Thanksgiving the boxes on the other side of the street were hit. Now, it was our turn. Equal opportunity assholes.
I’m not sure how many people got hit, but the next door neighbor’s box was up their driveway and as we were putting in a new mailbox (SIXTY DOLLARS!) a couple pulled up to tell us they’d been hit as well. We joked about electrifying the boxes or in our case encasing solid iron in plastic so when the bat connects with our box someone has to go get a cast…oh, a girl can dream.
I suppose we are lucky. This is the first box we’ve had to replace since moving in seven years ago and ours probably snapped because it was fourteen-year-old plastic, but it’s still a pain and an unexpected expense. The couple who stopped to talk to us said they were just going to bend their box back into shape and repaint it. We all laughed that knowing laugh because I can’t tell you how many times we did that at our other house. Our old box had duct tape on parts of it because there comes a point when you just don’t give a crap anymore.
The better-half and I decided we weren’t doing Christmas gifts for each other this year (we rarely do or we buy something for the house). After we finished installing the mailbox, we agreed this was one of the worst Christmas gifts we’ve ever purchased.