The End of the Mailbox...

...but the beginning of another?
This house, owned by a contractor and his wife, is at the end of our street.
Just as the old adage that the doctor's kids are always sick, this property has always been something of a junkyard. Every once in awhile they do some sort of upgrade. They put in a swimming pool. They replaced the random collection of storage sheds with a random collection of shipping containers, building materials and a second garage which presumably will contain all the stuff in the shipping containers. Their enormous boat is currently parked in the neighbor's driveway.

During the next to last flurry of activity, they built the brick wall, now covered with star jasmine, and a huge 2x2x4 foot brick structure sticking out into the street with a mailbox built into it. The rest of the neighbors hated it and we were all taking bets on how long it would take for somebody to run into it. I watched it being built, reinforced with rebar and bolted into a concrete pad, so unless one was driving a bulldozer, there would likely have been more damage done to the vehicle than to the mailbox. 

And it actually came to pass one day when a huge truck carrying half a pre-fab house down the street clipped the mailbox and continued obliviously down the street, the contractor's wife running down the street after it waving her arms and shouting, 'You hit my mailbox!' The truck with the house wound up stopped in front of our driveway and my next door neighbor and I, awaiting developments, couldn't help but laugh at the whole ridiculous scene. The mailbox had a small chunk taken out of one side.

The latest remodel has involved a massive number of workers' cars and trucks parked everywhere. Inevitably, we would meet one of them coming around the curve narrowed by the offending mailbox. More than once I had to bail into the bushes across the street to avoid disaster. However, the final stage of the home facelift  was when we came upon a worker knocking down the mailbox! We stopped to chat for a moment and he told us how hard it was to take down because of all the rebar. The pile of rubble is what remains, although it looks like the bricks have been removed.

This morning when we came around the corner, he was putting up a new mailbox.  The black metal box and the cardboard box it came in can be seen behind the pile of rubble. The worker was attempting to secure a black metal pole on the same concrete pad the old one was on. It can be seen listing somewhat listlessly in the shadows next to the street.

There is more to this story than meets the eye....