A lone snowman stands at attention on the Kansas Statehouse lawn, on Jan. 13, 2025 (Sherman Smith/Kansas Reflector)
By Robert Stewart, special to the Kansas Reflector
The 10-inch snow and high winds we had in Overland Park the first Sunday of 2025 was the kind of snow where, says poet Mary Oliver, “All the singing is in the tops of trees.”
Ground level, our postal carrier skipped Monday. No surprise. Our chickens moved into the garage. We all needed a day or so to get control of the situation. I had charged up my generator to keep the fridge and freezer powered in case of outages, which occur on our block more often than for friends. I can’t get a good answer as to why.
“The lights,” however, as my folks would call electricity, stayed on.
Even on spring days, we often find a neighbor’s mail on our lawn or in the street, stamped with tire tracks. I write this six days after the big snow, and no postal carrier has yet to be seen. FedEx, Amazon and UPS deliveries busy our street. Trash and recycling trucks came as scheduled. Neighbors cleared their walks. Stores are open, and the woman across the street leaves for work every morning at 6:10. No sign, no word or letter from the U.S. Postal Service.
My uncle “Red” worked for the post office after World War II until he retired. He was known in the family to be “kind of finicky” and “particular about things,” as my mother once said. I admired him for it.
My father and grandfather were plumbers, and they had to be particular about things, too. People I grew up around were mostly particular about things. My dad’s friend Don drove a bread truck and knew the owners of all the small groceries.
When I started to send my own writing to magazines, long ago, hoping for the return of an acceptance letter, a more established writer cautioned me: “Your life will start to revolve around the mail.” In the military, also, as late as the 1970s, our routine was best expressed in Randall Jarrell’s poem “Mail Call,” which ends, “The soldier merely wishes for his name.”
I am reasonably adept with computers. I pay some bills online, and my own writing often shows up in digital magazines. Some people have no need for the good old Postal Service anymore. A friend rarely checks his mailbox, nested in standalone clusters of boxes scattered throughout his neighborhood. It’s mostly junk, he says.
Printed paper, folded, glued, bound, or boxed and stamped, magazines, even bills, first-class letters, signed and handled by the sender, and, yes, sometimes a print journal with my name in it surprise and enrich me. Junk, as we call some mail, gets recycled.
Postmaster Louis DeJoy, according to Time in 2023, “aims to remake delivery service that deals increasingly less with traditional mail and more with packages.”
“Packages,” we should understand, mean purchases, corporate products, consumer goods. Indeed, regular first-class mail has slowed down under DeJoy, a logistics expert and Donald Trump donor. When my checks aren’t posted by due dates, I have called companies in Newark or Chicago to arrange payment, and strangers there counseled me not to rely on the postal service these days.
“Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds,” a sentiment from the Greek Herodotus and carved into the Farley post office in New York City, is not, the Postal Service wants made clear, an official motto.
Former U.S. poet laureate Philip Levine, lost in Spain years ago, wrote, “The mail here never leaves or leaves too late.”
Overland Park, however, is what I call a “built-up area.” Lack of public services historically troubles rural areas or small towns in this country where post offices are being closed. Los Angeles is a built-up area, of course, and not where we would expect huge wildfires. I say that to suggest that institutional infrastructures have us jammed up these days, staggering a bit.
The Postal Workers Union says the number of counter clerks fell roughly from 79,000 to 69,000 in 2023, and the turnover rate for new hires in 2022 was close to 60%. Blame low morale — how the term “postal” gained its grim connotation — low pay and overwork; or maybe workers now just don’t like being particular about things.
Or maybe they do. Our mail finally came in the late dark this Saturday.
What we have, still, are fellow humans, walking up to our doors or stopping on the road in front, and that, I say, keeps us grounded.
“The Rural Carrier Discovers Love Is Everywhere,” writes poet T.R. Hummer, when the carrier discovers newlyweds behind a privet hedge, on their lawn, still asleep and still naked.
After observing, “Lord, they’re a pretty sight,” the carrier makes one of the grand statements in contemporary literature by a messenger: “The hell with the mail,” he says. It can wait one day, affirming poetry’s humanity and maybe the mail’s. “There’s no one they need to hear from.”
Robert Stewart edited the literary journal New Letters at The University of Missouri-Kansas City for many years. Through its opinion section, Kansas Reflector works to amplify the voices of people who are affected by public policies or excluded from public debate. Find information, including how to submit your own commentary, here.
This article was republished with permission from the Kansas Reflector. The Kansas Reflector is a non-profit online news organization serving Kansas. For more information on the organization, go to its website at www.kansasreflector.com.
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