Walkng the mailbox

I went to pick up the News-Times on the ground near our mailbox. In the gray light of dawn, the mailbox looked odd. I blinked and looked again. It no longer had a smooth round top.
I went in and tossed the paper on the bed where my husband slept. “Someone bashed our mailbox last night.”
“What?!” He woke up quickly and went out to investigate. He came back in and gathered up tools to straighten the dent.
It was wasted effort. A couple days later, the same scene greeted me when I went to get the morning paper.
My husband flattened the dent on the other side of the box and muttered under his breath about federal penalties and potential imprisonment for mailbox vandalism. He envisioned them all for those who had damaged our mailbox.
A few days later it happened again.
We discussed the merits of buying one of those superior rural mailboxes. They weigh more than the mailman and have to be set several feet in the ground on concrete. The Superman of mailboxes was disguised as a Clark Kent innocent rural box, guaranteed to withstand anything, including a truck with a cable trying to pull it out.
During the season of fraudulent mailbox attacks, those ads were mighty tempting; especially the weekend we were going out of town and all we had to offer the mail carrier was a rickety tent of metal.
We left with a strange foreboding for the fate of our mailbox.
Three days later, when we returned, I peeked between my fingers as we turned the curve to our home. Our mailbox was dead — reduced to sheet metal. My husband gave it a proper burial in the metal recycling pile and replaced it with a plastic mailbox.
With one provision against the mailbox basher; he slid the plastic box on the new wooden platform, but did not bolt it in place.
“Let’s just bring it every night,” he said, setting the box down in the foyer by the front door. So we did.
While the neighbors let out their cats, reset thermostats and turned on yard lights and off house lights, we took turns walking tot he mailbox, sliding it off the platform, tucking it under an arm and carrying it into the house for the night.
When folks dropped by and commented on its useless location, we explained, “We bring it in every evening for its own good.”
One of the neighbors built a tower of bricks around his mailbox. It was a fortress capable of withstanding anything — except the front end of a truck.
Hours after dark, a loud crashing sound resounded through the neighborhood. The next morning bricks strewn across the yard explained the sound. A dented fender grill and hood on the front end of a neighbor’s truck explained the rest.
It’s been a years since our mailbox was reduced to sheet metal. One of my sons planted ivy at the base of the post. It grew and wound itself around the post, the platform and eventually the mailbox.
Life is peaceful around the neighborhood, I kind of like it that way.