with every paper I delivered.
Bad news on the doorstep.
I couldn’t take one more step.”
–Don McLean (“American Pie”)
First day/paper route/January, grade 5 (prose version)
It all went well till I got to the end of Thompson Drive which ran out of houses at the edge of a prairie.
518 was next on the list but Thompson proper ended in the 400s. In 30 below, I trudged back and forth on Ness pondering the glitch: a customer without an actual house.
Some 10 minutes on, I noticed a dark spot 150 yards away across the barren field. Could that, irrationally, be it? It was north of the 400s after all.
The Arctic wind blew– unforgiving from the north, lifting snow to sting and freeze my unscarfed face, but I got there. The iron numbers frostily on the house: 518.
And was welcomed by a bent, suspendered man with thick green glasses: Mr. Steele. Francis or Frank, as his wife called him. She was Dorothy or Dot in that last year before the old guy’s death.
They insisted I step in and sat me by the window with a hot drink, looking back on civilization. They were grateful I had come bringing news of the world (albeit late). The “new carrier”.
I sat and listened to them argue for 10 minutes until my feet thawed. The old man was nice and congenial. Dot did what he asked her to, but I wouldn’t have trusted her for a minute.
Another strange beginning that winter of yore, being taken in like that to their life apart. I wondered later how they had survived and plodding back, I realized why the previous kid had quit so soon after Christmas tips.