Small-Town Double Take Number One

After arriving in town, our first stop is at the office where the keys were left for us in an envelope taped to the door. Small-town double take number one. Unfortunately they don’t work so we go to the house and unload the office stuff out of the little U-Haul we rented, unload our house stuff (mattresses and towels and toys – the essentials while waiting for your moving van) and then reload the office stuff back into the truck. Where is Frenchy when you need him? Exhausted – yet again – but happy to be in our new home, we order the first of many take-out meals and settle in for the night. Nothing but the sound of the wind in the aspens and the occasional crunch of tires on our newly graveled street. Bliss.

Now I have always lived in a city or a suburb where we take certain services, I discover, for granted. Specifically speaking, trash and mail. Having been in our little house in the valley about four days my husband announces that we have no mailbox. Odd, I thought. Well, we'll just have to get one. But having never lived in a house or apartment that didn’t come with a mailbox, I first think – miraculously –to check with the post office.

“Let me take your number and I’ll have the carrier call you about where she can deliver your mail,” said the woman behind the counter at the post office. Huh? Talk to the postal carrier? Is that legal? First of all, in the city I never knew who was going to show up with my mail – half the time it was someone wearing street clothes and a pith helmet. I had no idea who carried my mail. I’m pretty sure the post office had no idea who carried my mail. In a couple of days, a friendly voice on the phone informs me that she can deliver my mail to Emery and South street, about a block away, because there is already a mailbox she delivers to there. Faced with the choice of either going to a mailbox on a random corner or going to the post office where our mail is kept safely behind lock and key, we opt for the post office.

About the same time, my husband discovers that – surprise! – we have no mailbox at the office either, even though it is on Main Street downtown. Or in town. I’m not sure Westcliffe is big enough to have more than that – up, down, eastside, westside. Just in town. Anyway, now we have mail that is just floating around in post office purgatory because both addresses I so efficiently entered on my change-of-address cards in Dallas appear not to exist. We decide to get one PO box for everything which entails filling out more change-of-address cards so when the mail returns to the Westcliffe post office from the non-existent addresses we expected it to arrive at, it now has to be re-routed to the box in the building. However, that change-of-address has to go through Colorado Springs – 75 miles away – to get the official o.k. So much for less red tape in small towns. The government is still the government. Enough said. So we wait patiently for our mail. It has just now started to trickle in. Amazing how fast bills find their way to you whereas checks must not have that same acute sense of direction.