The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

My mail lady drove up our long driveway yesterday to deliver a package. She’d driven past my shack and tried to find me there, but no … so she drove up to the house and I came out to get my mail and my package and to thank her, once again, for going a bit beyond expectations. Today her boss is being grilled by the House of Representatives for pulling mail boxes out of cities, for yanking huge sorting machines from post offices and for slowing down delivery. I’m expecting next week they’ll stop issuing stamps.

In 1775 the colonies started the first national post office with none other than Ben Franklin as its chief. Two and a half centuries, if my math is close. There are those who argue the Postal Service should be privatized, the same folks who don’t trust the one we got with delivering fairly and promptly this year’s mail in ballots. Right. Let the CEO’s have a shot at it. Course when they have to deliver to the last mailbox in Noplace, Utah or Backwash Camano, you can bet the cost of a stamp will shiver yer timbers.

I might worry a little more about this absentee and mail-in ballots if I weren’t so worried about polling machines that keep no paper trail. I might worry too if the President himself wasn’t mailing his own in. I’ve been voting by mail for a long time now, better than hauling down to the Little Church in the Ravine to vote like I did the first decade or so when I moved here. Something kind of creepy about casting ballots in a church, you ask me. And I know you didn’t.

So yeah, I’m a big fan of the Post Office. Call me a socialist and knock my hat crooked, but when something is working, why break it? And, in full disclosure, I’m still one of those anachronists who write handwritten letters, one sitting right here ready to take down to the mailbox. Old habits are hard for me to break, I guess.

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