Every Pontoon on the Cove Flew One

Winter

I carry the mail out of the Versailles post office. Rural route, a little over ninety miles a day, six hundred and some boxes, in my own car with the steering wheel on the right side so I can reach.

My route runs right along the ridge above our cove, so I know every box on it and most of what comes in them.

That is a strange way to know your neighbors. I know who gets the seed catalogs and who gets the past due notices. I know who is on oxygen because the supply company ships to them.

I know whose grandkids still write real letters at Christmas. I do not say a word about any of it, ever. That is the job.

All that winter, driving the ridge in the sleet with the heater going and the radio on the farm report, I kept thinking about that photo with the gap in it.

Not about Willa so much. About the gap. About Drew looking at it at the bait shop when he thought I was not watching.

I had a lot of time to think. You do on a route like that. It is just you and the gravel and the boxes, and the dogs that know your car, and the old women who wait at the end of the drive in their housecoats because the mail is the only visit they get all day.

Sometime in January, sitting at the stop sign on Highway 5 with the wipers going, I thought: what if next year every boat on the cove flew a flag.

Not just mine. Not a matching theme. Just the flag, on every rail, the way Brady flew his.

I laughed out loud in the car by myself. Then I did the math on the back of a carrier’s pad.

There were thirty-four pontoons that had run in the parade the summer before, mine included. That was thirty-three flags I would need to buy.

The Flags

I looked a long time before I ordered. I wanted good ones, not the printed polyester kind that fades by August. I found three by five embroidered nylon flags made in this country with sewn stripes and brass grommets, and a rail clamp mount and a five foot pole to go with each one.

They came to twenty-nine dollars and ninety-five cents apiece for the set. Thirty-three of them, plus shipping, was one thousand fifty-four dollars.

I paid for it with my Saturday overtime from February, March and April. Saturdays in the winter are long on a rural route. Nobody else wants them.

I want to be honest that it was a lot of money for me. I am a widow with a ten year old and a house payment and a pontoon that needed a new bilge pump.

I almost did not do it. I sat with the order on the computer for two weeks before I pressed the button.

What decided it was Drew. In April he came home from school and said his class was doing a unit on the flag, and his teacher had asked if anyone had a flag with a story, and could he take Dad’s.

I said yes. He came home that afternoon walking taller than I had seen him walk in two years.

The boxes came the first week of May, four of them, stacked on my porch steps by the parcel carrier, who is a friend of mine and gave me a very funny look.

I knew I could not put the flags in the mailboxes, even though I drive past every one of them every day.

You cannot put anything in a mailbox that has not gone through the mail. That is federal, and I have known it since my first week of training.

So I decided to hand them out myself, dock to dock, on my days off.