Operating a publishing business in a remote area is not without its challenges. Realistically, in most places, you take things like mail delivery for granted. We’re a half mile from our mailbox, which means the letter carrier does not come up to our house. I don’t even know what she looks like.
Postal rules mystify me. In this case, as it turns out, if your house is more than half of a mile from a county road, the location of your mailbox will have no relationship to where your actual house is located. It’s one reason so many people around here rent P.O. boxes from the post office.
Because we don’t go into town very often, a P.O. box has never been a good option for us. In our case, when someone orders a book from one of our online stores, I buy some postage online, print out labels, package up the book, and then walk down to the row of mailboxes and send it. With the help of the folks at the Sandpoint Post Office, we set up a secured outgoing package box, which our letter carrier accesses with a special type of postal key.
We’ve been getting quite a few book orders, so I’ve made the walk down to the mailbox part of my daily routine. Before lunch, I head out on my journey, and almost every day, there’s something new to see. Today it was 11 inches of snow. Objectively speaking, our postal situation may not be particularly convenient, but being forced to stop work and take a walk through the forest isn’t exactly a hardship. It’s just one of the many sort of idiosyncratic things I like about living here.