The Flags on My Mail Route Went Up

What the boxes held

Over the next five hours I opened box after box with the flag up, more than twenty by the end.

There was no emergency in any of them. Every one had an envelope in it with my name, and a good many of them were envelopes I recognized. Dwight Kessler had used the back of a grocery store flyer. Opal and Nell had each written their own, in their own handwriting, saying slightly different things on purpose.

Every one said the same sort of thing, in a different voice. A day of the week and a time and a place.

Nell’s said: “Monday, nine o’clock, biscuits. Opal will tell you hers are better. They are not.”

Opal’s said: “Monday, nine o’clock. Nell’s biscuits are tough. Come hungry anyway.”

Dwight and Bonnie Kessler had written theirs on the flyer. “Thursday, ten. Dwight has a lawn mower he needs you to listen to. It runs fine. He wants to see you. Bonnie.”

By two in the afternoon I had a stack of envelopes on the passenger seat. For thirty years I had carried the mail up to those porches, and now it was coming back the other direction. I ate my lunch in the Jeep, parked at the Kessler box with the engine off, and I did not taste a bite of it.

The envelopes were all in different hands. But I started to understand something about the whole business. The days of the week did not overlap. Nobody had picked the same Tuesday as anybody else, and nobody’s note said anything about a retirement party. They did not want to give me a party. They wanted to put me on a calendar.