NEW SALEM — Wendy Flanders can expect her retirement to arrive in nine business days.
Following 40 years on the contracted New Salem route, the letter carrier is hanging up her mailbag for good on Sept. 30 and retiring from the Orange Post Office.
“Almost all my family members worked there,” she said on Monday. “So they told me when this route was up [for grabs] and I put in for it and I got it. It was great because while my kids were young I could get home before they got home from school.”
Flanders took over the route as a 29-year-old mother of four. She works six days a week, driving her Honda CR-V to about 225 stops in New Salem while also delivering to a sliver of Orange. Although New Salem’s rural, winding roads can be challenging in the snow, Flanders said she could always call the town’s highway superintendent if she got stuck.