Enclosed with the bill was an announcement of a new state holiday: Shake Your Mailbox Day is October 23. Michigan residents are encouraged to go out to the side of the road and give their mailboxes a good shake to see if they're sturdy enough to survive being buried in snowbanks. "If you can shake your mailbox, it probably needs maintenance."
The swing-away mailbox is one of the great inventions of all time: an elegant and ingenious answer to a problem that vexes residents of a wide swath of the continent. What could be more clever than to allow the mailbox to pivot out of the way, then employ gravity to return it to position? That little bend in the mounting post is a stroke of genius, and at least as worthy of the Nobel Prize as Gustav Dahlen's "sun valve" which copped it in 1912.
ReplyDeleteI do appreciate Georgia for its mostly mild winters.
ReplyDeleteI'm thankful every day that I no longer live in Michigan.
ReplyDeleteThere seems to be a holiday for everything!
ReplyDeleteWe don't get enough snow here to have that problem but about ten years ago when backing out of Helen's driveway during a brain fart I knocked her mailbox post over.
ReplyDeleteNo big deal, it was likely 30 years old anyway, I just put in a new one for her.
Ranger Bob is right, a swing-away mailbox is pretty cool, properly made.
Of course there are other solutions here to keep the pesky youth from knocking them over, like mounting your mailbox on an engine block attached to a steel post, they're not going to risk messing their car up by bumping it.
My buddy Chuck owns the Swingclear mailbox company up in Ironwood. Leave it to the Yoopers to figure out how to deal with the combination of big snow, giant plows, and plow drivers focused in gittin' er done. http://www.swingclear.com/
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