Look, a Mail Box is a Very Demanding Thing

You go to your hardware store, and you pick one. You find something that half-way matches your house and then you carry on. Screw the thing up, and get your mail out of it.

To refresh you, this is what our present mail box looks like.



Which Simply Will Not Do.

Options.

A wooden one that we could stain the same colour as the deck and the railing (Gettysburg Blue from Behr).Which would be ok, but I'm not convinced that we wouldn't have the same problem, because it would blend in to the house, and we would still get our mail in a wide variety of places, because no one can find the mail box. Not a charming or delightful, or even pleasing mail box. Sufficient, I suppose.

Mr. Spit, being fiscally prudent, looks at the metal ones. Which are adequate. I mean: they do the job. You put mail in them, they have those curved thingies to put the paper in. (Which is totally retarded, as we don't get the paper, and when we did, they kid just threw it on the deck) Any way, they would work, I guess, if they had to. But I'm telling you, very pedestrian. Ho Hum. Positively ubiquitous. A metal mail box says something about you. That your last name is Smith, you dress in beige and you drive a brown car, which you bought used, because it was reliable, and cheap and easy to keep clean. Also last night, you had boiled potatoes for dinner, and have never bought an avocado in your life.

Such a mail box is Clearly Not Suitable for Chez Spit, so I keep looking. (Mr. Spit, dear man, keeps talking about the metal boxes, mostly repeating $18 dollars in an increasingly excited voice).

That's it. Black, top loading with a splendid brass maple leaf on it, says mail in a charming script. It's not adequate, banal, or ubiquitous. No, not at all, this mail box, it is a symphony, it is a large canvas, an opus work. This mail box is enthralling and bewitching, and possibly it would be using too many adjectives (but hey, they're cheap): this mail box is delectable and irresistible, electrifying and seductive. This is a mail box I tell you, all others are aluminum wanna-be's. All others are merely things that hold your mail. This mail box has possibility.

What do you suppose a lovely black mail box, looking like wrought iron, not forgetting the brass maple leaf, and the words "mail" in lovely, soft, inviting font, would cost a home owner?

Did you guess $187 dollars?

Yeah. Me neither.

But I like it. Mr. Spit did too, until he saw the price. Which doesn't mean much, as I have been pointing out all day; because he does like it, he just doesn't like the price, and if you amortize the cost of the mailbox over the life of the house, well that's actually less than $2 per year, which is a pittance, peanuts, I tell you. Besides, everybody knows that it's those little finishing touches that really make or break a first impression. Curb appeal makes such a big difference, and I know we aren't planning on selling this house, you know, ever; but it still matters, and we want the neighbours to like us and think well of us, and we have new sidewalks, and new street lights, and new curbs, and a whole new paved street, and the city is shelling out 20 million on the revitalization, and the very least we can do is shell out a mere $187 on a mail box that fits into the neighbourhood. It's our duty. It's practically patriotic.

(at which point the Lancaster Bomber flew overhead, and I think maybe Mr. Spit was thinking that Churchill was, by far, the better orator)

Anyway, back to the mail box. So, we are still arguing discussing about what we are going to do, and in the mean time the current one will stay where it is.

But, oh wise internets, you think I'm right, don't you? The choice of mail box is a very demanding one, and you just can't cheap out on these sorts of things. After all, the neighbourhood is depending on us!

Oh, and while we were feuding calmly debating the merits of the best mail box in the store, we got some more stuff done.