There are places in rural America where Amazon won’t deliver and FedEx won’t tread. The USPS doesn’t make money serving them—but that’s not the point.
There are 603 people in my mom and dad’s tiny town in East Texas, and my parents don’t even live in it—not really. Their house is outside the city limits, three miles down a road bearing the initials of my grandma’s grandpa, who died young, poor, and unable to write his own first name. On either side of the cracking asphalt there’s a national forest, until you hit a curve and see pasture—the farmland our family carved out of the woods nearly 200 years ago. The only people who brave this winding, pothole-dotted road are the eight people who live on it—I’m related to seven of them—and one person who doesn’t: the mail lady, who happens to be the preacher’s wife.
She’s employed by the United States Postal Service, which the president wants to turn into a business—even though there is absolutely no capitalist case for what the preacher’s wife does.
In her Jeep—rural mail carriers use their personal vehicles—she drives down roads like my parents’, delivering last-notice bills, birthday cards, and Amazon packages. She has done this for 20 years. Once, over a decade ago, I heard her whisper to an old lady in the pew behind her: “You wouldn’t believe the old men in this town who order dirty magazines.” The preacher’s wife knows the sins, debts, and online shopping habits of everybody in my parents’ town, but luckily for them she’s no gossip. At least by Baptist standards