Family Correspondence

The line at the post office was a slow-moving beast that seemed to have little interest in hurrying itself along. We were all there for one reason or another, most of them minor—a pension here, a stamp or two there, maybe a bill payment if you were feeling responsible.

I ended up behind a woman with blue-tinted hair who seemed more interested in gossip than minding the line. She turned to me and said, “She likes a clean house, you know”—speaking about herself, I gathered, and gesturing toward herself with a manicured hand—“so she hires a woman to keep it clean. And her husband hires one, too,” she added with a nervous giggle as if her words were a sparrow that had escaped its cage.

A chuckle rippled through the line, as polite as it was perplexed.

I nodded, trying to keep the peace, but said, “Yesterday was my grandmother’s birthday.”

Her eyes widened a little. “Oh! She must be really old, then.”

I nodded again, deadpan as could be. “Yes, yes indeed. She’s a hundred and eleven. She died thirty-seven years ago.”

A silence settled on us like an unexpected drizzle, the kind that was too light to do anything about but still too heavy to ignore. I filled it up with the first thing that came to mind, leaning in with an air of mystery. “There was a crow in my garden all day yesterday,” I said.

The woman with blue-tinted hair nodded as if the crow were the final piece in a puzzle she’d been turning over in her mind. “Well,” she said, “that would be your grandmother.”

Before I could make heads or tails of that, the post office clerk—a dour man with the countenance of someone who’s made friends with routine and wasn’t about to betray it—slammed a stamp down on the counter with the finality of a judge’s gavel.

“Next,” he declared.

I sighed as I moved forward, nodding my thanks as the clerk handed me my stamps with a look carved from stone. Another family mystery put to rest, I suppose, by the unimpeachable logic of the U.S. Postal Service.