The Swinging Mailbox...........

When I started this blog, I made a promise that I would not blog about my children.  This blog is about my own life and my personal journey through middle age and even though my children are a very large and important part of my life, their lives are their own.  (Besides, they made it clear that they did not want to become the objects of my posts.)  But I don't think I can be expected to keep my entire family out of my blogging because then, I would be left with almost nothing interesting to blog about.

Case in point, the photograph above is a photograph of my dad's new mailbox.  While I have been busy battling the sock monster over the past decade, my dad has been engaged in numerous bitter battles of his own.  Many of these battles are with the forces of nature.  He has waged war on the ants that invade his kitchen each year, the squirrels that build their homes inside his, and the rabbits that feast in his gardens.  Recently he's been engaged in battle with the forces that seem intent on destroying each and every mailbox he installs.

Dad lives just outside the city limits on five acres that he affectionately (and somewhat comically) calls "The Farm."  Although he hasn't put a lot of energy into maintaining the house (well, aside from installing a corn burner for heat and devising an organizational system that allows him to type an item description into the computer, such as "old phone books", and immediately be given information that will direct him to the exact room and box number containing said item) he has spent a LOT of time and energy maintaining his outdoor property.  He has transplanted weeds from the back field into his front yard and laid down old carpet between the rows to prohibit the growth of "unwanted" weeds.  He's designed and built all kinds of small and large gardens which grow scattered all over the property.

 He even dug a swamp in the back field using nothing more than a shovel and his own man-power.  (This was supposed to be a pond, but after a couple of years of hard work, he decided to call it a swamp so he could be done!)

Most of these outdoor projects he enjoys.  So it has been a great annoyance to him to have to interrupt these projects to install yet another mailbox.  The events that destroyed his previous mailboxes vary.  Sometimes, a snowplow has knocked the post over while engaged in the task of snow removal.  Other times, it has been a carload of "hoodlums" that get their jollies by knocking off mailboxes with baseball bats. 

After the last mailbox was destroyed, Dad spent a couple of days designing a mailbox in his head that would withstand all kinds of vicious abuse.  He scouted around the property for materials and found everything he needed just laying around in junk piles, waiting to be put to some glorious use; heavy linked chains, railroad ties, telephone pole, heavy sheets of metal. 

Once again, using nothing more than his own manpower and an old pick-up truck, he built and installed his new mailbox.  It looks like this

He's managed to move the post far enough away from the road that it should never again be flattened by a passing snowplow, while still allowing the mailbox to be close enough for the mailman to fill it without having to descend from the mail truck.  Pretty ingenious.  I'm thinking this mailbox will last for a long time!