small town stuff

Three only-in-a-small-town happenings today:

1. Went to the post office to mail something. Forgot the suite number to the address. Meg, the postal clerk, said, "Call me, I'll fill it in for you." Paid for the postage (I had the zip code), drove home, called Meg and away my package goes. I think in a larger town you would have to take the package home and come back to mail it. Of course when we lived in Milton, FL we were outside the boundaries of the "city" and could leave packages in our mailbox to be mailed. The postman would take them to the post office, mail them and leave a slip in our mailbox letting us know how much we owed. I wonder if they still do that there?

2. Driving home from running the aforementioned errand there were several trucks at an intersection. Turns out that a power line was down and a couple of those amazingly wonderful people known as volunteer firemen were there diverting traffic, such as it was, and waiting for the power company to come fix the problem. I knew both of them and had a lovely conversation with one, ending with my best regards to his wife who is a friend of mine. Again, only in a small town does one make small talk with an on-duty fireman in a situation like that. Of course it probably helped that I was the only car around, not a lot of traffic at that particular intersection.

3. Driving home from an outing with my friend Christina we almost hit a deer. Seriously, we missed it by mere inches. Christina screamed, hit the brakes, I grabbed the dash, the deer kept going (thank goodness). I don't think you have this problem in more heavily populated areas. I could have done without the adrenaline rush that caused but am grateful that no one was injured.

And in other small town news our one traffic light town is temporarily a two traffic light town. There is now a light in front of the town garage where there is some construction work going on to fix one of the bridges. They have to bring the road from two lanes to one in order to make the repairs. Funny how all of a sudden people are going the "other" way and how inconvenienced they feel by having this extra light in town. We should be grateful, really, considering how many lights they probably have in the surrounding towns.