My Life as a Post Mistress

I have the rare privilege of working in a time capsule. I work very part time (normally 3 hours a week- Saturday mornings only) as a PMR (Post Master Replacement) at my local post office, just a block from my house. I often walk to work. The front lobby is all modern business and even the back room, you see just past the open window, looks mostly up to date. But there are timeless treasures hidden among the modernizations. I have the joy of collecting mail from the outside box secured with ancient padlocks that require an equally ancient flat key to open (my favorite key).

When the sales window is slow, I explore in the storage room- often to get acquainted with where certain supplies are squirreled away, but also to revisit the past- when a typewriter was used to fill out forms and twine was used to secure brown paper wrapped packages. Balls of string are still stored in a drab green metal cabinet along with a rubber stamp holder that I secretly think would make a wonderful steam punk Christmas tree. There are also lots of ancient, wooden handled rubber stamps, brittle with age; their once important impressions now long past useful, to anyone that is, accept a collage artist. ;)

Some things I wish I could take home, like the "Giant" Apsco pencil sharpener that has the dial that lets you sharpen any size pencil -even those jumbo pre-school pencils! The paint spatters on its metal casing and probable dull blades do not detract from its mystical abilities to transport me to another time when getting up from a school desk to sharpen a dull pencil was a welcomed break from book work. And the smell of a newly sharpened pencil? Heavenly! In the present, with everything written in permanent ink or documented on computer, the Giant is relegated to perpetual storage.

Finally, there are the lovely, yellowed ledgers and other documents, still stored in a filing cabinet, forgotten by past Post Masters and never discovered by the current Post Mistress. Book keeping from the 1950s kept because no one has had the courage to throw out "government property", yet also no one has bothered to find out if the Smithsonian is needing to fill gaps in its small town Post Office collection. Hee hee! One ledger is even burnt on 3 sides, showing evidence of surviving Corder's Main Street fire in 1956.

WHY is all of this still kept? It just kills me to be so close to an altered artists' gold mine and not be able to touch it. Well, I can touch it, hold it, admire it. But then I have to put it back.

I thank God I work here. He knew it would feed my spirit.

And how can I not be inspired?