April 18: At the desk of Highway Contract Route 74, I survey my daily load of letters, flats, and parcels. Utility bills, unemployment checks, hardware and furniture catalogues, scores of envelopes from the offices of politicians and Department of Motor Vehicles. And thin, white, padded envelopes the size of my palm all the way from China and Krygyztsan to California, pill bottles, baby toys, pet food, books, clothing returns (including Spanx), even a pyramid of plastic Tupperware wrapped tightly in transparent film with a set of stamps stuck on top and a tub of laundry detergent marked Priority Mail—Signature Required. There are so many Amazon boxes, pallets and pallets around me, like an indoor forest.

April 20: Poppies line the curb and blanket the hillsides. I sit and drive from the right side of a beater van with a dysfunctional speedometer and a gospel Christmas CD stuck in the player.

April 23: Today I saw elk grazing in a green field. I met Josie, Bamboo, and Mack, all “loud but completely harmless,” according to Vaughn, Tembra, and the owner who didn’t introduce herself but I know, from Citibank statements, is Machelle.

April 24: It’s been a week, and I finally place the incessant chirping appropriately. The white boxes near the doors out to the loading dock bear the words, Live Animals.

April 25: The chicks and ducklings, I was told, are for customer pick-up only; carriers don’t deliver them. I hear little else but chirping and see in my mind’s eye little else but the perforated sides of cattle trucks on a highway, dark shapes standing stationary within them. What will happen to the birds if no one claims them? The postmaster didn’t say.

May 1: Today the sheep were shorn.

May 5: At night, I continue to hear the beeps of the handheld parcel scanner. Upon waking, I see the orange streaks of its laser instead of sunbeams. I think in evens and odds, addresses lining a two-way street. 

May 7: I spend my day in the car chasing my own tail. Getting outside of this bubble seems necessary for civic participation and staying inside it crucial for health and income. I get home exhausted without quite knowing why. I dream of roadkill rising with the morning fog.

May 8: I texted Georgiana to gripe, but she replied, “The country is in isolation and you have a lonely job. Yet you connect people in a way. It’s poetic.” 

May 9: Today the purple of the rainbow was more purple than a clover.

May 14: Today on my drive to work, the death toll was 78,000. On my drive home, it was 80,000.

May 16: I passed a small truck parked on the shoulder with its entire cab aflame. The rush of heat reached my open window, across two lanes of traffic.

May 18: It occured to me that of all the occupations illustrated and described in Busy Day, Busy People, I have tried nearly half: retail, grocery, food service, agriculture, teaching, now postal worker. Since first holding the picture book, I’ve tried to do it all.

May 19: Today the strawberries went unpicked in the rain.

May 23: Cracked skin, hangnails. I remember the exposed bones of the post office in Busy Day, Busy People, the bins and trays and conveyors, the metal slots and blue slacks. I remember how the clerk’s hands indented the soft sides of a beige sack he lifted, and how this suggestion of embrace, a shadow really, comforted me. Filthy fingernails, but not as many paper cuts as you’d think. Some people wear gloves.

May 26: Masks are now a thing, required and reviled. In addition to brown roots pushing at blond bangs, I’ve noticed the smallness of one carrier’s ears. Like a chinchilla’s. I meet my most vocal coworkers: the ones who oppose mandatory mask-wearing, crying out at the safety meeting against being upstanding, civil servants. “Why do we have to be accountable to the public?”

May 27: Today I delivered a box of live cockroaches to a middle-aged woman with a French manicure. She looked surprised to see someone in her driveway. Less surprised about the insects—for her son’s bearded dragon, she said. I’m pretty sure my mom would have sent me hunting them down in closets and garages (or that big, old barn over there) instead.

May 28: “At least no kids,” Georgiana points out to me. She means that Smithsonian Magazine article she forwarded to me earlier this year mentioning how people used to ship and deliver children by post. We’ve both read the frequent news articles about kids in this very century, this very month, separated from their parents at the U.S.-Mexican border and transported to detention centers.

May 30: At today’s safety meeting the postmaster says, “Watch out for people trying to steal stimulus checks from right out of your hands.”

June 4: Any day I retrieve the pile of boxed saplings from the plant nursery to bring back to the post office for the outgoing truck, I feel a cold wash of apprehension about the geometrical shitshow that ensues vis a vis my tall, rectangular contents and the stout, tapered cart. 

June 10: I’m on the loading dock facing a large box with a HEAVY sticker. Danny asks, “Want a hand with that?” I reply, “I want to do it myself,” though I want more than anything to be within six feet of him, our fingers brushing and voices lowered.

June 13: When I was young, I saw only possibilities when flipping through Busy Day, Busy People. I never saw how gendered, idealized, and colorblind the jobs were—women in tight, pink dresses carry food trays to tables from the kitchen where men in toques dish it up, etc. I see this now, and I see the nascent milieu of my generation: busyness.

June 16: “We’re going through a culture-changing event that hasn’t fully sunk in yet,” Georgiana wrote. “Stop beating yourself up, girl. For fuck’s sake, it’s hard.” 

June 20: When I feel most connected to others is not when I’m around the two dozen carriers and handful of clerks on the cavernous floor of the post office’s backroom in the hectic mornings, when carts come around every bend and parcels fly into their respective corners for delivery. It’s when I’m listening to the community public radio station on Saturday mornings. Two hours of Jimmy Humble’s Humble Pie folk tunes followed by an hour of callers on The Trading Time with Doug and Renee.

July 7: John fingers the envelopes from the VA I just put in his mailbox. He bends my ear with his rant about a flaky substitute carrier, how he’d like to see her pushing up tulips down the road. Tulips? I think, but goosebumps sprout on my arms.

July 10: Today the postal inspectors called me a third day in a row, seeking witness statements and written testimony about my report on John. Do you know if he has guns? Do you think he’ll go through with something?

July 25: Saturday. For an hour, I drive around my charge of random stuff people ordered online. Doug and Renee give air to strangers seeking and offering stuff just as random, with more rust. Doug rings a bell when a caller or emailer offers an item for free. He gives listeners a verbal “area code alert” when someone lists a phone number from afar. When he speed-talks through the rules at the top of the hour and says, No professionals, please, I guffaw. What is a guffaw anyway? Maybe I don’t know what “professional” means.

July 31: I wish someone would deliver me from insecurity and ambivalence.

August 2: Today was a tree day.

August 8: I had no idea people had such a frequent need to offload refrigerators or generators, canning jars, old magazines. So far on The Trading Time, I’ve heard plenty of trade requests for small engine repairs, and lots of trade offers for mowing or baling. A woman called in with a children’s teepee for sale, sewn by hand from a kit. Another woman called in to say white people should stop selling Native stuff.

August 15: Sometimes I amuse myself by thinking I’ll call in to the radio show too, to tell these people where I’ve seen an A/C unit, TV monitor, tire, or playset on the side of the road along my route. 

August 18: I am busy for the time being, being a carrier. Being myself, being enough.

September 9: Today wildfire smoke shreds my throat, the snuffed-out sky hung like wet sheets. The center line was clear, then covered with fur and guts. For fuck’s sake.

September 14: I still haven’t asked Danny if those are Playboy bunnies on his mask.

September 17: Behold the glut of individuals, those industrious workers, the proximity of their bodies on subways and planes! When I hold the pages of Busy Day, Busy People, I am overcome by the humidity of those colorful streets, the casual way a boy sucks a popsicle and lets red drip down onto the sidewalk. 

September 19: Saturday. When a man calls in and describes what may be a car part then says, “And a bunch of other stuff, I can’t remember what,” I get a little angry with him. Because when Renee says, “Hello caller, you’re live on the air,” wouldn’t you have your items written down on a notepad in front of you? Wouldn’t you be outside in your barn looking at the hunk of junk to find its dimensions and model number?

September 22: As a girl, I had a pen pal in Japan. As a teen, I sent letters home from study abroad. Even now that email has taken over, I write snail mail to friends. I get it: It must mean something to live as if there’s someone out there to hold your thoughts, tokens, stories. To make a gesture and trust, trust someone like a carrier (like me!) when you sign and seal and send.

September 24: Today I made sure a box labeled “Cremated Remains” got the passenger’s seat to itself in due respect.

September 26: Today a woman introduced herself to Renee as Yasmin and carried on in a gravelly voice about not being able to keep up with the weeds and burn piles on her property. When she said, Won’t your listeners do the right thing and help a neighbor out, I almost choked on my water. Her desperation, the thickness of her need spreading through my speakers, infected my cab. Soon, another woman’s voice came on the line, “sweetening the deal,” offering $200 cash to anyone who heard Yasmin’s call and would answer it with their pickup and weedwhacker. This floored me, too. The taking seriously of the need. Near the bottom of the hour, a man called in to offer yet another $100 to whichever nice neighbor saved Yasmin from her Himalayan blackberry. So many essential strangers.

October 10: Yasmin was on The Trading Time again. She said she was someone who could live without a lover, she’s learned that much in her many years, but not without a handyman. This time Yasmin offered twenty-five dollars an hour to the would-be worker and listed the tools in her shed for one’s use to get the job done. For a second, I considered texting an ex and inviting him on a mystery date, Wear boots and bring gloves! I considered whether this call, the monologue and plea, Renee’s greeting and the fleeting recognition, might be Yasmin’s schtick. But Doug and Renee are so patient with her, so gracious, like professionals. I make someone’s day, too. My customers—their birthday cards, their catalogs, so many cardboard boxes and all that crap—make mine.

October 15: Today I hauled a giant, cardboard box shipped from Arizona to California at the cost of ninety dollars, marked Fragile, every edge agape and frayed to reveal such fragilities as a heavy-duty orange extension cord and a shiny, black high heel.

October 24: I love all of the letters. I love all of the absent and inverted addresses, chicken scratches passing for script, insufficient postage, odd shapes and undeniable odors, envelope flaps like hinges. My jaw is a hinge, getting rusty. It’s okay if my brain is a blob these days, Georgiana would say; my heart is definitely a muscle.

-Amy Whitcomb

Amy is an artist, editor, and educator based in Northern California. Her poetry and prose have recently appeared in Witness, The Baltimore Review, Poet Lore, Terrain.org, and other journals. She holds a Master of Fine Arts degree and a Master of Science degree, both from the University of Idaho. You can find her at www.amyawhitcomb.com.