Do you ever wonder why when you're driving in the country, you see mailboxes hanging off posts, misshapen or just sitting on the ground? As far as we can tell, mailbox abuse seems to be a part of country life.

During the summer, the local paper is full of police reports of damaged mail boxes. Mailbox battery is apparently a summer pastime.

At left is our mailbox. Note that the back right panel is no longer attached to the sides. This was the result of a mailbox attack that occurred a few years back. Our theory is that kids in the country get their driver's license, then drive aimlessly around because they can't find anything to do. There ensues the following:

"Hey, wait a minute! Let's see what happens when we beat on this mailbox with my baseball bat? Wow! Look at the dents. Uh-oh, we better get going before someone drives along and sees us."

Our mailbox actually looks pretty good, all things considered. We took a mallet (which we use to knock together the pieces of the wood cabinets Kevin is building for our house--that's a future post) and banged most of the dents out from the inside. Although it's not quite back to its normal shape, it works pretty well. We sometimes get rain inside where the back isn't sealed, but it serves its purpose.

This same mailbox came under attack one fourth of July. We aren't sure what kind of firecracker the kids put in it, but whatever it was exploded out the front of the mailbox and burned off quite a bit of the paint. That's why the colors look rather odd (see image at right). I was not about to be bested, though. I took my paint scraper down to the mailbox, scraped off the burned paint flakes, then sprayed flat black paint over it.

I'm  surprised the mailbox survived that attack. But it's still in better shape than others I've seen. Some have the doors hanging awry. Others are dented even more than ours--you wonder how the postal carrier gets the mail in. Sometimes the post is laying on the ground with the mailbox still attached. And sometimes, the mailbox is just sitting by the side of the road without any post at all.

I'm sure ours would have been missing by now, but when we tried to install it using a post anchor, we ran into rock (see getting started and name) and bent the anchor without making any progress. Back to the drawing board we went. We couldn't just set it on the ground because the only place to put it by the road was in a deep ditch. Try as we might, we couldn't get any sort of post in the ground. Then, we hit on the obvious solution: Cement the post in a pile of rocks to hold it upright. Finally, a use for some of those rocks!

Mailbox post set into rocks