Post Office

I love our post office.  And I had a funny experience there this morning that I must share.  But first the post office.  We live in the town of Rye, but more specifically, the Rye Beach Precinct.  When we were looking at our house here to possibly buy, the seller's realtor pointed this out to us and spelled out three characteristics that set the Precinct apart from the town - it has sidewalks, charming street lamps, and its own post office which does not deliver your mail, you have to go retrieve it yourself.  That's right, no mail carrier.  Sure enough I looked outside and saw that indeed we had sidewalks and street lamps, very charming, and I recalled an adorable post office practically across the street. Wonderful,  I thought to myself, to walk there every day and get our mail.  How villagey.  How cheery and cheer. He also stated that there were exactly 81 houses in the precinct.

Sidewalk and street lamps!

The little Post Office belongs to those 81 houses, so every time I go in there, I am becoming acquainted with my true neighbors.  And I met another one of those neighbors today.  Cracked me up.  But back to the post office.  Not long after moving in I asked Sherman, our post master, why we had the mail set up like we do.  He related that back in the late 1800s and early 1900s, this neighborhood was mainly summer homes and a couple huge elegant wooden hotels like the Wentworth by the Sea in New Castle.  Wooden, which facilitated their eventual burning to the ground from newfangled methods of lighting and heat from gas etc.  The post office served the summer folk and hotels in the precinct and protected their mail.  Well this neighborhood is no longer a summer community but rather year round homes and families,!but the post office box tradition lives on.  I am sure our house was never a summer house; it was a farm, and where the golf course is now was once its fields and apple orchards - as a matter of fact, the name of this house is Apple Tree Cottage.

Apple from the one remaining ancient tree on our property - I rubbed it on my pants after I picked it and it looks like I bought it at the supermarket!

Now the funny story - at least it is to me.  I was getting my mail from our little box and noticed a quite elderly woman hunched over her walker a few boxes down from me.  I greeted her and commented on her lovely sea green silk blouse (it really was lovely), which also accentuated her long skinny breasts that drooped to her belly button.  How cute I thought, but please never happen to me. She started to make her way slowly and carefully to the front PO door so I ran ahead to open it for her.  As she passed by me and through the door she said, dead serious, "thank you, I'm 82, I'm grateful to be, but it's a real bitch".  I died.

Pretty stuff I pass on my way to the PO