I quit my job. I am no longer a substitute rural mail carrier. I no longer drive sitting in the middle of my car for 6 hours on Saturdays reaching and tugging mailboxes and schlepping hundreds of pounds of mail. I have a long list of little practical reasons why I quit, but the truth is, I just didn’t like it.

So I am working on reclaiming the car. Because driving 100+ miles of gravel roads every week makes your car dirty. Add one rainy, muddy, Saturday to that and we can say downright filthy. The outside was coated with dirt.

And now it isn’t. That color shift is not a trick of the camera. The car is silver, it’s just the dust that makes it look tan.

But really it’s the inside that’s appalling. That dust gets in through the open windows and through the tiniest cracks. Patting the upholstery sends up clouds. You have to wipe away the dust to read the clock and the odometer. It is caked into the crevices around the door latches. That part I’m still working on.

And then there is the permanent damage. No matter how hard you try, sometime those mailboxes just sneak up on you.