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My little brother Bruce was right. A year ago September, when Bruce came here from Alaska to stay with Dad on the farm for three weeks, Carol and I took off for the East Coast to visit relatives and see the sights. I gave Bruce a list of, I suppose we would have to call them assignments, six tasks that Carol and I would normally assist Dad in accomplishing. Dad was ninety-two years old at the time.
One thing I asked of Bruce was to please replace our father’s decades-old, rusted rural mailbox. Seemed to me, the cracked hinge mount on the mailbox door was not likely to endure many more tugs and slams, and I didn’t want to be the one to deal with installing a new box in the winter if the door failed to latch or fell off completely and allowed Dad’s daily pound of political propaganda and his half-pound of charitable donation requests to blow away in the wind, rain, and snow.
But Carol and I returned from our travels and found nothing new at the end of Dad’s driveway. Bruce explained that he had judged the mailbox to be good for yet another while. He went on back to Alaska.
I am pleased to report that Bruce’s prediction was correct. More than a year has now gone by, and the old box never did spill its contents upon the ground. But I, a person with a feebler faith than my dear brother’s, weighed the pros and cons of further procrastination and elected to purchase a new mailbox and put it up. Dad helped. We finished that project just this past Wednesday afternoon, with snow on the ground and with sleet stinging our faces.
Whether winter has actually come to stay, it is too soon for me to say. I felt we got this little job done “just in the nick of time,” but there’s no way to know if that is really so. Maybe that old mailbox would have yawned again and again, twice each day, with Sundays off, on into eternity. But I was impressed with Bruce’s guess, and I intend to consult him about other matters of seemingly limitless longevity.
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