Post Offices and Place

Today I almost missed my Metro stop because I was engrossed in a newspaper article about a young man chronicling endangered post offices. Evan Kalish has visited 2,745 post offices in 43 states since 2008. Yesterday he wrote about the closure of a post office in St. James, Maryland. It was tucked away in a general store and featured an imported (from Pennsylvania!) postal facade that looks like something out of a movie set.

When we lived in Groton, Massachusetts, we mailed our letters and packages from a dignified old brick post office with friendly New England clerks. It was the sort of place where people lingered, chatting about when the first snowflakes might fall. It was part of the magic of that village, a component of its character.

When we first moved to Virginia, our post office was a corner of the local hardware store. I'd wait in line there, one baby or the other on my hip, to mail an article to one of my editors in New York. Though far less picturesque than Groton, it had its own madcap charm.

Years passed, the Internet arrived, and I sent my articles by email, my letters too. And that, multiplied and magnified hundreds of thousands of times over, is why post offices are closing.

But understanding the reason isn't the same as agreeing with it. As the post offices shut down, the small towns and hamlets lose their postmark, their centerpiece, their community center. And the world becomes a little more homogenized, a little more boring, a lot less placed.



Photo, Gosselin Group Realtors