Mailbox roadkill

It's been sunny for the past 4 days. Yippee! This winter seems to have been so long. The weatherman says we had snow on the ground all but 3 days this winter. The days have all been so dark, dreary, and overcast too. I feel like I'm emerging from a cave into the sunshine again.

Here's Pookie outside walking along the south side of our patio room. Can you see the emerging spring flowers along the edge? At the very bottom of the picture you'll see a little purple. Here's what it is! It's some purple crocuses starting to bloom!

Several Saturdays ago someone killed our mailbox. I had a big black rural mailbox out by the road. It was a present from my mom. A woman driving a Yukon SUV ran it over. I was looking out the office window at the time and wondered why our mailbox went flying down the road! It took me a minute to figure out what had just happened.

I went out to retrieve the mail since it had just been delivered a few minutes before. The wooden post the mailbox had been mounted to was broken off at ground level and the mailbox was laying halfway across the yard with some of the mail scattered in the snow. (Here are pictures before and after. Hubby had already taken the battered mailbox away.)

I picked the mail up out of the snow and headed back to the house shaking my head and muttering when a vehicle pulled into our driveway. A lady got out and said she mowed down our mailbox. At least she had the integrity to come back and own up to what's she had done. For some reason she felt the need to pick up the mailbox and the wooden post and put them back where they originally were. LOL!

She apologized and said she was reaching for something in her purse when she drifted off the road and hit the mailbox. (Answering a cell phone?) After talking for a few minutes, she gave me her name and phone number and said she would pay to replace our mailbox. The only damage to her SUV was a small crease and black mark on the front bumper and a loose parking light. If she'd been driving something smaller, hitting the mailbox would have done a lot more damage to her vehicle.

Problem #1:
The ground is frozen and there is no way to put up another wooden post to hold a mailbox. That meant we had to shop for a metal mailbox stand mounted on a concrete base. It took two stores before we found one and that only after I asked if they had any. They were outside the exit door where you only saw them on the way out of the store. Go figure!

Problem #2:
The mailbox and stand was too heavy for either of us to lift. (Hubby was less than a month out from hernia surgery at this point.) And it wasn't going to fit in the car either. We asked our next door neighbor if he would go pick it up with his truck and put it in place. He was nice enough to do this for us on Monday. We have good neighbors. :)

I called the lady who hit the mailbox and gave her the replacement cost. I also asked her how her husband reacted when she told him she had damaged their SUV. She said he was upset for about 10 minutes but was glad she wasn't hurt. She said she would mail me a check. The check did arrive by the end of the week. (There are still some honest and decent people left in the world.) Thankfully by the time it arrived we had a mailbox to receive it. LOL!

Hubby said it was lucky that neither of us was at the mailbox getting the mail when she drove by. There could have been more than the mailbox damaged. :( I've had a few close calls from people who seem to find it amusing to speed and drive as close as they can to me as I retrieve the mail.

The one bad thing is the mailbox we now have is tiny and won't hold much. I'll have to wait for nicer weather before we can replace it with another big mailbox.