Getting Mail, or Not

We get mail delivered here three days a week – Monday, Wednesday and Friday. When a Monday is a holiday we only get our mail Wednesday and Friday. Frankly I am surprised they deliver at all.  It has to be over 50 extra miles of driving for the carrier to deliver to the half dozen or so places out our way.

The old slogan, “Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds” doesn’t apply to us. If the weather is bad on one of the delivery days, he doesn’t come. I don’t expect to see him tomorrow (Friday) because big rain is forecast. We sometimes have to wait several days to get mail unless we want to drive the 80 mile round trip to town.

One time I was expecting something really important in the mail. I don’t even remember what it was, now. The weather had been really bad and we hadn’t gotten any mail in nearly a week. I had to go to town for supplies anyway so I stopped by the post office to get my mail. I told the clerk about our situation and she said, “Impossible! The carrier always delivers the mail.”

“Not ours.” I replied, “Under the best of conditions he only delivers three days a week.”

“That can’t be true. We deliver six days a week.” she said.

“Not where we live. Go check to see if our mail is here.”

She came back, shaking her head, with a big handful of letters, advertisements, and the important thing I was waiting for. Maybe it was a check. She was so surprised at our situation but it’s been that way out here since I have been in the area, which is over 20 years.

This situation requires some planning. If a bill is due, we have to make sure to put it in our mailbox well in advance or bring it to town. Or if someone mails a check to us, which we always want as soon as possible, who knows when it might be delivered?

Getting packages can also be undependable. UPS has delivered to us a number of times. They are losing money doing it, too. There are so few people out here that the odds of delivering packages to more than one customer on any given day are near zero.

Fedex won’t come out here at all. They deliver our packages to a mini-mart/gas station about 23 miles away and then call us to tell us it is there. The owner of the gas station says it happens all the time. That’s OK with us, though. One of us goes to town a couple of times a week and the store is on the way.

If you live off-grid, the odds are you are not very close to town and are probably not on a paved road either. I suspect many people living off-grid don’t get mail delivery at all, so we count ourselves as lucky on that account. If you live in a really remote place I’d like to hear your post office and package delivery stories.

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