Why I Live Near a Little PO

Walked down to our little PO today. Other than the grange hall, where we have town meeting in alternate years, the yearly talent show and occasional town suppers, there is no other public space in our little village of Williamsville. We had a wonderful gourmet general store, with brick-oven pizza and fancy food to go, besides just milk and eggs, but to the disappointment of many, it went out of biz a couple years ago. My neighbor, Anne, remembers when the first floor of a woman's house was the PO and she was the postmistress. It is still in the same house where that woman lived, but renovated (save for the wrap-around porch) to look pretty much like a regular US post office, just smaller and perhaps more quaint on the outside. Many of the POs in Vermont look like this and given the money the USPS is losing due to e-mail, etc, it will be very sad when and if these charming outposts, which are just as important to touch base with one's community of neighbors as they are to give and send mail, go out of business for good.

I've had my run-ins with our infamously cantankerous postmistress, but we've warmed to each other, finally, over these past few years and today, when I heard Nokie (who I tied up outside as I mailed packages) barking, I told her it was Judy's dog. Everyone knew Judy. Her life remains a very sad mystery to many people. What happened to her that she ended up without heat, running water or the will or ability to care for herself? How did she end up dying alone and not being discovered for a couple weeks? Since we found her body on July 1, I get little bits and pieces of her information about her life from different people I run into here and there.

She wasn't a hoarder all her life, for example, and some people at her funeral remembered when her house was clean and she made lavish dinners and had guests over to to enjoy them. She was a traveling nurse and a psychiatric nurse at different times, and apparently was very loving to animals and generous with people--cooking meals, for example, for an elderly couple who used to live in the house on the other side of the covered bridge.

By the time we met Judy, she wouldn't let anyone into her house and we would leave eggs (when we had chickens) by the door, or she'd greet you at the door, as she did when friends attending our Guy Fawkes potluck and bonfire, brought her over a bowl of chili because she said she wasn't feeling well when I called to invite her, but that she would really appreciate some food. Paul and I were friendly with Judy but we knew to keep our distance, she had a way of entangling you in her ranting politics (she ran, unsuccessfully, for town clerk) and in her general sense of chaos that swirled around her life. I took her to the mechanics once and she was very grateful, but we heard her poor old, small white car sputter and cough and struggle to come to life many mornings.

She told me she didn't have heat, but kept warm in one room with the electric heater and her dog (he really has struggled to understand why we, unlike Judy, don't let him lie on the couch with us--he is too big! Plus we have two cats). I said, "Judy, you know you could get fuel assistance." She probably could have had oil delivered free to her house, but she had a way of not only not wanting help, but confounding, confusing and torturing those who tried to help her. She took showers for a while at a friend's house, but they had a falling out and weren't speaking at the time of Judy's death. I heard many stories like this. Also, about how she rescued many animals, including a goose for which she built a special pen when it got injured (accidentally by her, but that's another story).

We are still feeding her outside cat, a scruffy orange and white creature with a shortened tail. How he survives these winters is a mystery, but we've seen him living outside since we moved here four and a half years ago. Each morning we (usually Paul) puts food and water on the sagging porch of Judy's now-empty house. There is an old wooden bin with an opening cut into the bottom that Judy apparently set up and I added nice, cozy flannel blankets to the basket in there as well as straw stuffed in all around it.

Today at the PO, the postmistress said, "Judy really lost it in the end. Once she told me she knew everyone at town hall was speaking about her because she stood outside and listened through the window."

"Well," I said, "once she told Paul and I, very matter-of-factly, that a raccoon had gone into her kitchen and stolen some jewelery." She said as if this was very normal, as if all of us had wild animals wandering around their kitchens. We somehow gleaned that her basement was sort of open to the elements and perhaps all kinds of critters wandered in and out.

Just then I heard Nokie bark outside the PO and just after, Richard came in. He is a real character, a fantastic potter with Raku firing kilns made out of old maple syrup drums, who has lived here since the early '60s in a very old farmhouse. He is known for his eccentricity and dry, if sometimes cranky wit. He is very thin with a long, bushy mustache; he wears worn t-shirts and jeans and sweaters with moth holes in them and fraying wool at the hems.When gas prices are high, he refuses to drive any of his various beat-up vehicles and instead dons an old 40s-style leather motorcycle helmet, with the long flaps over the ears, and takes his ancient bike spinning through the bridge and into town.

"I'm sorry," I said. "Did Nokie bark at you?" I asked Richard as he opened his mailbox.

"That's okay," he said not looking at me as he pulled his mail out through the narrow opening, "I barked right back."