I ENJOY THE STROLL to get the mail-usually with a dog and several cats along. Our half-kilometre lane is also the perfect distance for a kid who needs to blow off steam. In our family, young people aren't sent to their rooms for "time out," they're sent on a run to the mailbox. When I was growing up on the farm, mail was delivered Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays. You could post mail, too. The box swiveled, and you'd turn it perpendicular to the road when leaving a letter for pickup. After delivery, the mailman turned the box parallel to the road. A friendly carrier might bring a parcel right to the house. There was occasional vandalism, especially at Halloween. Sometimes boxes were dented, rammed or riddled with bullet holes. When my husband and I took over the property from my parents a decade ago, it came with a cute barn-shaped mailbox my father had made. I was fond of that mailbox; it was a nice memento of Dad's handyman days. Then it went missing. We'd given up hope of finding it when we received a call from an acreage owner some 15 kilometres away. He'd discovered our mailbox in a ditch near his home, with mail scattered about. Having located us from the mail he'd retrieved, he kindly returned the works to us. The police investigated, but it's tough catching mailbox marauders in the act. It was unsettling. Perhaps we'd lost important mail. Maybe I'd missed my chance at the Reader's Digest sweepstakes! The potential for theft, including identity theft, is huge, when you think of bank statements and such littering a roadside. Meanwhile, after more than a century of delivering mail to rural homes, Canada Post is re-examining its policies. Last year, mail delivery to thousands of country dwellers was halted, after workers complained of health and safety issues on rural routes. The federal government ordered this service restored. Since then, the Crown corporation has been assessing rural mailboxes across Canada. There are more than 800,000 of them. When they come to ours, they'll see we've retired our vandal-tempting decorative mailbox. My husband fitted a rusty barrel with a hinged door and welded it to a pole, which he pounded deep into the ground. To add to the fun, we just received a letter postmarked September 2006. It came with a brief apology from Canada Post, alluding to unforeseen circumstances resulting in delayed delivery. It turned out the person who had the contract for our rural route had been hoarding bags of unopened mail at his home. We continue to receive mail in our makeshift mailbox, but recently someone smacked it with a heavy object. This bent the door so letters get soaked during rainy weather. We're considering replacing the ugly mailbox, or signing up for the communal mailbox a few kilometres away, though pranksters sometimes overturn that one. Although we have to pick up parcels and registered letters in the city, we've resisted getting a permanent post office box there, feeling we're entitled to home delivery. We could fit our mailbox with an alarm, warning of mischief afoot, but the delivery person might be inconvenienced. It would certainly surprise every coyote and dog in the vicinity. They have their own uses for our poor old mailbox. Check out Sheila's new blog, here.