Quick Turnaround!

Note: Please don't forget about my Reader's Poll up there in the upper right corner of this web page. For more information about the poll, the 'why' of it, so to speak, please read  my post explaining the whole thing by clicking  HERE.








I made my way over the customer’s sun-drenched front lawn. They don’t have a walkway; they don’t even have that thing people do where they set some flagstones down on or in the grass and call it a walkway. You just stroll up over the thick, green grass until you get to the house.

I was folding the mail to fit into their mailbox as I hit the bottom step. They have a small mailbox, one of those horizontal ones, but it’s quite shallow and won’t really hold a lot. I roll the bundle of letters and one magazine a little tighter, hoping to get it all to fit in there in one shot. As I reach the top of the stairs, I reached out with the hand holding the rolled mail. What I planned to do was flip the box open with my fingertips, then slip the mail down into the box, all in one smooth movement.

In the next moment the mail was dropping through the air to land on the porch in a jumbled pile. My mail satchel was slapping hard against my hip again and again as I high-stepped back across the lawn toward the street. There was a strange, high sound emanating from my throat that a less discerning listener might have classified as something of a ‘shriek’, or possibly a ‘girlish scream’. I however, having heard the sound quite clearly (as I was its source) would hasten to correct them with the phrase ‘manly cry of surprise and alarm’.

Anyway, when I was done running and screaming I turned back to survey the porch, abandoned mail and all, with my hands on my knees as I caught my breath. Above the discarded letters and magazine a half-dozen or so sleek black and yellow bodies hung in the air, bobbing this way and that, and angry hum reaching my ears all the way out in the street.

Yup. There’s a hornet’s nest in that mailbox.

Talk to you later!