Mailbox Murder

Our house was built in the 1970's, and it and the other homes in the neighborhood had cast-iron posts holding black mailboxes, which I'm sure gave the subdivision an orderly, unified appearance. Over the decades, of course, many of these have been replaced, but we still had the original in front of our house.

It's had a couple of rough times since we moved here in 1994. In 1995, Hurricane Opal slammed it to the ground, but DH was able to repair it, and so it lived on. Then, it seems to me, some years later a vandal bashed it with a baseball bat, or so we assume, causing a minor amount of damage.

But then, on the weekend of January 11, 2009, while DH happened to be awake for a few minutes in the middle of the night (you know the phrase, "Nothing good happens at 2 AM"), he heard some screeching tires followed by a crash/thump, and looked out to see the streaking lights of an automobile racing away. "Oh, no," he thought, "I hope they didn't just take out our mailbox. Well, they did. It was dead.

Initially, we thought that this was another case of vandalism, but a close inspection revealed otherwise. A neighbor helpfully pointed out the tire tracks that swerved over our front curb and back out again, suggesting that the driver was either asleep or hopelessly intoxicated, and by the time s/he realized that a mailbox had swerved into his path, was unable to avoid a collision.

I'm not sure what this says about me, but I felt a little better after seeing those tire tracks. Considering the damage that must have been done to the perp's car, I am happy to know that at least the mailbox got in a swing this time.