All the recent news stories about the US Postal Service and its money troubles have had me thinking a lot about the local post office, and how it probably won't exist that much longer, if all the hype is true. This depresses me.

"Why on earth does that depress you?" you may ask, and you would join a chorus of other people who've asked me the same thing. Well, I'm glad you asked.

See, I grew up in a small town. The local post office, along with a gas station, a car repair shop, and a breakfast & lunch only diner, were all we could boast of. Not even a stop light. Back in the day, we didn't even have the option of home delivery for our mail. Everyone in our town was the same in this one respect -- we all had to drive, or on nice days, walk, to the post office to pick up our mail (and at Christmastime, maybe even a package!). There was no flag to put up for a mailman to pick up mail you needed delivered. You drove to the post office and emptied it into one of the shiny blue metal boxes---the one on the left for mail in town, the one on the right for out-of-town.

Like most of my peers, at eighteen, I left for "the big city" to attend college. I got mail delivered to my dorm, and rarely had need to go to a post office. Then I headed overseas for a year, where mail was marked on the board by our gate, or perhaps some sort of delivery man would drop it off at my door. When I came back home and lived with my parents for a few months, I treasured the routine of picking up the mail from the post office every day. It seemed it was the only thing "normal" in my life anymore.

Now, I'm married, and I live with my husband (Still weird to say sometimes!) in the town where he grew up. If possible, this town is even smaller than my own hometown. Not in actual size, but in the way people know one another. You will find it impossible to go anywhere in this town without running into at least one person you know. And probably at least one relative. I love it, if for no other reason than that it is so wholly different from anything I've ever experienced--to be known wherever I go.

Each morning, before I head into work, I stop by the post office to pick up our mail. I always get there around the same time---a few minutes before nine. The post office doesn't open until 9:00 am, so there's always a line formed by the door, and people talking with each other--about their families, their most recent health woes, what the weather will be this weekend. Almost always, someone holds the door for me, or vice versa, and we smile, and look each other in the eye, and ask how the other is doing. It sounds silly, but this one interaction in the beginning of my day really matters. It makes me feel human, and it makes me realize they are human too. All these people, who have joys and fears and worries and hopes, just like I do. It makes me step outside my own world for a minute, wondering what their life might be like.

So, I don't want the post office to close. I don't want one more human interaction, in an already fast-paced, efficiency-driven world, taken away. I don't want those beautifully weird-looking boxes to sit empty in an eerily-empty buliding--or worse yet-- in the dumpster. I need the post office to be here. You need the post office to be here. For our sanity---to make us slow down, to make us remember that we need each other.