The scythe arrived on Friday after a drawn out discussion with our rural letter carrier via notes in the mailbox. If we’d been in the city, I’d have had it on Monday evening. Tuesday morning at the latest. You see, when you live in the city and a package needs a signature, you merely leave work fifteen minutes early and swing by the post office. Out here, work and the post office are an hour apart, so we are at the mercy of the all-powerful rural letter carrier.
Shortly after we moved here, we received a pamphlet and a greeting from our rural letter carrier, Pat, and her backup, Debbie. Pat wanted to let us know that she was our post office on wheels. She shared this with us through the pamphlet that was, I’m fairly sure, a xerox copy of a mimeographed copy of a document pounded out on a typewriter sometime before I was born.
Some helpful hints from my post office on wheels:
— Rural customers need to affix postage onto their envelopes. (No longer can you put a chicken in the mailbox and expect your letters to get to their destination.)
— Do not alter your address as it was given to you by the post office. (Damn.)
— Rural carriers are not responsible for money left in unattended mailboxes. (Or chickens.)
Luckily for me, my mother was here and able to wait for Pat to appear with my scythe. According to my mom, Pat was a finely coifed little old lady. She sat in the passenger seat of her car. The steering wheel was in front of the driver’s seat. To steer the car, Pat reached over with her left hand and spun the wheel. My mom could only guess that there were pedals on Pat’s side of the car, but perhaps she has extremely long legs.
If all rural letter carriers drive like Pat, the helpful hint on the pamphlet to keep children far away during mail delivery time makes a lot more sense.
Having grown up in a small town and driven behind some rural carriers, their sudden lurching towards roadside mailboxes leads me to believe that steering-from-the-passenger-side is not an uncommon occurance.
-A
Sounds about like where I grew up. I know for the longest time, my grandfather never once bought a stamp to affix himself. He always left coins in the mailbox along with his letters. And, yeah, that driving from the passenger side is pretty normal, unless they have one of those new fangled little mail trucks with the steering wheel on the right side. Heh.
Hey, congrats on the snazzy new site! I already love hearing about life on the farm. I was going to ask what the scythe was for but since they are tools of limited use I guess I can use my imagination. I guess a better question is what sorts of things do you plan to scythe?
I mostly plan to use it to mow around things where our push mower won’t go. When we get critters, I may use it to make “lawn” hay. We have a decent amount of grass, and I don’t want to buy a lawn mower or gas-powered weed eater. Hopefully eventually we’ll have critters to keep most of the bigger areas trimmed down, and then I’ll just mostly be edging. We’ll see.
Somehow it seems driving like that must be illegal. I have a hard enough time driving those roads with the steering wheel in the same quadrant of the car as my hands.