You can tell a lot about a neighborhood by its mailboxes.
What were they thinking, exactly? Especially the one horn on the "cow" one.
Recently I decided to focus the blog a bit more, honing in on the unique, underappreciated, even unknown, aspects of life in Hawaii.
I live in a working-class Hawaii neighborhood. I know, I know, you all thought from Renaissance Man's (aka The Hubby) awesome photography, that my house was glamorous, overlooking a golf course and the ocean.
Ha. We have a neighborhood golf course that won't show up on ANY travel brochures whose shaggy grass I can see if I stand in one corner of the deck and squint hard. I can also see the ocean by squinting hard. But the neighborhood itself is… a typical working-class Hawaii neighborhood, which I realized may be considered “colorful” by people in say, Canada. So I started carrying my little camera around and taking pictures of what seems to unique.
an attempt at classy. No tongue in cheek here, alas.
Yeah. This one has bemused me for years as I walked my neighborhood. I wish it was irony, or whimsy, or anything else that signaled something other than bad taste.
Someone built this. Intentionally.
My writer's imagination makes a story about this homemade birdhouse/mailbox combo– a kid's project with his dad or something? Who knows?
A tree, carefully trimmed, makes a classy umbrella over these mailboxes.
I like the attempt to trim the tree into a mailbox shader.
This is a pretty good one a block or so away from my house.
I had to throw in a pretty good one. I mean, at least at one time it was nice.
After years of debate, we decided this was a whale. My son still says it looks like an earless, legless cat wearing a top hat.
And I end with the attempt at “topiary” that marks the entrance of our neighborhood. They work hard on this thing, and it shows.
Welcome to the Real Hawaii, where real people live.
What do the mailboxes in YOUR neighborhood look like?
All the mailboxes in our neighborhood are hidden – you have to hunt for them 😉 I can always tell when we have a substitute mail carrier because everything is just dumped on the front porch. The few that bravely sit openly are armored to within an inch of their life . . . or hanging, battered and twisted.
I’m sorry but that’s just SAD.
Lucky you live Hawaii. I used to love walking up Sierra Drive in Honolulu and see all sorts of mailboxes. Sometimes they were in the walls.
It’s a great eclectic bit o local color!
I really like how your mind works. Only you could take a subject like mailboxes and turn it into a great post.
Thanks Simeon, I hope you got a chuckle out of it, I do every morning!
It took me a long time to figure out the little flags on US mailboxes have a purpose. I used to think they were a weird kind of decoration. 🙂
Mailboxes over here are all very different: often a letterbox in the front door, a separate brick structure, or a free-standing kerbside box of any kind of design, really.
Every once and a while you run into an ‘interesting’ one, like (don’t click if you’re easily offended) this one 😉