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Missing Mailboxes and Reciprocal Community (Part 1)

Writer's picture: Joseph R. GoodallJoseph R. Goodall
The lost box.

The winter sun shone across my back at a severe angle. Its light cast thousands of shadows over the brown lawn below my feet and the dormant shrubs huddled along the neighborhood street. With a shovel in hand, I marched toward the hickory tree leaning over the stream flowing beside my yard. Invasive vines had spent the growing season creeping up the scrappy tree. After several frosts sent the vines into hibernation and coaxed the hickory out of its leafy coat, the tree’s solitary position was even more apparent on this degraded segment of streambank. It felt like a fool’s errand to tear the shriveled vines from the dormant tree, considering how persistently the creepers return year after year, choking out all competition. But the bright winter afternoon offered the perfect window of warmth and clear access to the tree trunk.

I texted my neighbor, alerting her I’d be crossing over to her yard to get better access to the tree. Though I didn’t consider it at the time, the text was more than a courteous gesture or means of eliciting praise. It was akin to the age-old question of the falling tree in the forest—would my actions amount to anything if no one else was there to support or share in the effort? As this tree, in all its gnarly, bare glory, would teach me—along with several other converging conversations, community-driven stories and unexpected, everyday objects—the threat against neglected treasures can become the forerunner of their revitalization.

There were several unnatural landmarks along my short route to the tree. First, a gravel construction driveway cutting down the steep shoulder from the road. Then, a dark blue porta-potty on the edge of my neighbor’s yard across the street. Both heralds of the stark, linear construction zone carving through my side yard, a swath of red soil and dusty equipment running parallel with the stream nearly a mile in each direction. Several towering yellow excavators, their cabs and arms left at odd angles, stood guard over mangled segments of metal fencing, crumpled plastic bottles, and cylindrical concrete manholes with gaping holes like pieces of a brutalist playground. The hickory tree cowered behind this disruptive collection of machinery and materials, bent into an “S” curve from decades of following the sun and adapting to an ever-changing environment.

At the edge of the road, a black, metal object caught my attention. A discarded mailbox lay on its right flank among the roadside leaf litter, crumpled like a dead animal struck by a passing vehicle. I paused, slumped my shoulders, and studied it again. I settled on another metaphor—a hibernating bear with mouth slightly ajar, the waterlogged mail protruding from the bent-open door like a swollen, wrinkled tongue. The mailbox was decoupled from its wooden post, missing one of four white street address numbers, though the faint outline of a “seven” was visible near the red plastic flag. 

I scanned the area—no nearby neighbors missing a mailbox at their curb. I didn’t recognize the number, and it felt too intrusive to check for a name on the rumpled mail. I realized I’d absentmindedly noticed it a couple times over the last week while walking past but hadn’t stopped to identify it. Perhaps it was a casualty of the construction work, or a spillover from a pickup truck with a lowered gate. 

Suddenly, the loud thwack of a slamming plastic door pulled me from my thoughts. Ten yards away, a man in track pants and a sweater marched away from the porta-potty. There were no other construction workers around, so I felt out of place with work gloves, a heavy shovel and a knit hat pulled down over my forehead. I dropped the shovel against the dense shrub and pulled off my gloves. The man walked quickly, with his head down, toward a woman down the road. Neither of us waved. Perhaps he was embarrassed to have just relieved himself in front of my yard, or that there hadn’t been any hand sanitizer inside the portable plastic toilet. I probably wasn’t the least bit intimidating, but I was still worried about seeming so. As if the metal shovel blade could rival the looming construction equipment next door. As if it was a threat to this passerby that I wanted to care for one of the few remaining trees along this section of degraded stream bank. 

But I was also peeved. The man had stopped to take advantage of the convenient porta-potty in front of his neighbor’s yard on a Sunday afternoon, yet ignored the littered paper and fallen mailbox. The urge to relieve himself was greater than the desire to investigate an object obviously out of place. The couple continued on their walk, so I stooped to retrieve my stashed shovel. I eyed the mailbox again, considering how I’d ignored it myself, lumping it in with the construction activity and roadside litter. I wondered if I would be willing to walk around with a broken mailbox until I found its rightful place, or at least until I found a trash can.

In that quick moment of overlap, between the ruined mailbox and porta-potty, perhaps what I wanted most was for someone else to acknowledge how unnerving all this change to our physical environment felt. To drop a line, like a letter into a mailbox. To extend a gesture of connection like the roots of a tree.



 


Visiting a mailbox is a daily ritual for many people, often a mindless trip to and from a literal stake in the ground marking a place we have committed to attend—a physical location through which we exchange communication, solicitations and business dealings. A mailbox represents a life lived in a particular location. A place where we can be contacted, where our attention can be caught, where we hear stories, receive news and reach out to others with our thoughts and requests.

The Marvelettes sang pleadingly to “Mr. Postman” for a letter from a lover in their 1961 hit. On television, Mr. McFeely faithfully delivered the mail for over thirty years in Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, always accompanied by his friendly refrain of “speedy delivery!” But by the turn of the millennium, the romantic comedy film You’ve Got Mail was referring to a digital exchange, without stamps or a routine walk to the street or the post office.

There are likely dozens of studies detailing how we send and retrieve far fewer envelopes via curbside metal boxes than our parents or grandparents. Nowadays we spend more time scrolling through online news feeds on our portable devices than browsing a physical mailbox. Large language models can synthesize the information contained in a thousand encyclopedias and phone books, formulating lists and narratives much faster than we could pen a letter by hand. Our society continues to evolve. 

But we are still bodies sharing this earth, living in fragile communities. Some of our neighbors may not have a physical address, but they still live out their days near us, breathing the same air and waiting on the same sun to rise and set. We all use the bathroom, move our bodies, enjoy looking at the sky and eating food. Amidst those routines and desires, chores and adventures, we long for meaningful connection, for laughter and advice and a variety of ways to say and hear “I see you.”

And even these exchanges require space—memorable yet often mundane locations, like mailboxes, dinner tables, offices, grocery stores, sports fields, cafeterias and airports, where we run through a dance of figuring out how to build trust, succeed and fail in a relationship. We need more than only transactions or silos of sameness. We need places we can show up without an agenda of spending money or working or accomplishing. Places to just be around each other. To practice, to learn, to celebrate, to mourn, to be held.

These places already exist, we live in or pass by them every day. But have they been left on the side of the road, dormant, neglected, disconnected from their potential? 



 


It is a breath of fresh air to come across groups of people who commit to a place, seeking to understand and tell its stories in a unique way. Whether by choice or circumstance, birth or bereavement, serendipity or sickness, their curious persistence uncovers particular beauty, bearing the weight of harrowing tragedies and illuminating the triumphs and flaws of ordinary, hardworking people. These creative caregivers, network builders and storytellers set an example for us to follow—by acknowledging their reliance on their immediate environment and living with attuned senses, they show it is possible to take on the messy endeavor of building trusting relationships, to learn the needs and resources of neighbors, to embrace an evolving, practical yet risky way of love that shapes both yourself and your community.

In short, like a mailbox, we crave commitment, localism and reciprocity in our relationships. And we may be inspired by observing, but we won’t truly learn other than by doing.

In her book Holy Unhappiness, Appalachian author and musician Amanda Held Opelt writes about how we wrestle with disillusionment and the false promises of instant gratification and formulaic happiness. It is often easier for us to center our lives around places of like-minded “belonging,” with the assumption that associating only with people who act and think very similar to us will be a shortcut to relational bliss and fulfillment. 

“It seems to me that we are constructing our lives around only bonding organizations and bonding mechanisms,” observes Opelt, “algorithmically curated social media echo chambers, the nuclear family, homogenized churches, and small, carefully selected friend groups. Office spaces shared by people of various demographics and political persuasions are disappearing. Perhaps what we really need are more bridging opportunities. We need to be in proximity to people who challenge our thinking, expose us to new viewpoints, and disrupt stereotypes with their physical presence.”

Going against the grain of consumerism and shallow, unfulfilling connections does not mean that the world is hard-wired that way. There is abundant inspiration to be found from the many other creatures and ecosystems which offer us food, shelter and comfort. Indigenous author and botanist Robin Wall Kimmerer expounds on this idea in her insightful book The Serviceberry. She shares her enlightening experience of eating small, sweet serviceberries from her neighbor’s shrub, alongside hungry birds and buzzing insects on an early spring evening. Though her friends cared for this tree, she did nothing to earn its sweet fruit other than by being their friend. 

A Native American word for berry can be translated as “gift.” Kimmerer points out how this idea of gift-giving is about “mutual flourishing,” finding ways to recognize and honor how we are dependent on one another for survival and well-being. We can learn from the rest of the natural world how healthy relationships are based around giving and receiving with respect and gratitude.



 


The discarded mailbox with leftover mail in my yard was a time capsule, a relic, no longer existing in its purpose but a reminder of its function. I wondered, did this person’s remaining mail still matter? Had their life continued on without it, or had they moved away? 

Are the depositories of our lives, with all the interconnected stories strung across us, more than piled up junk mail? Can we be part of a web of support, an exchange worthy of our attention and contribution? Certainly the exchange is dynamic, generational, wide-reaching. But it can and also must occur in small, simple, nearby ways. 

This fallen object had caught my attention. What else could it teach me about engaging with my own community? Of what other experiences could it remind me?


To be continued . . .

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