ochopee, florida post office

In Wednesday's post, I mentioned our day trip to the Ochopee Post Office. This tiny Post Office located in the vast Everglades is the smallest in the United States. The building, 8 feet 4 inches deep and about 7 feet wide, used to be a shed to store tools and tomatoes. Now it’s a full-fledged post office with room for only a single clerk. It has 40 P.O. boxes and sends a carrier out six days a week on a 170-mile route to serve 300 patrons who dwell mostly in the middle of nowhere. During winter, this place is a tourist attraction. People line up at the window for postcards bearing the coveted Ochopee 34141 ZIP code. When Todd and I visited, we were the only ones there, we bought a few post cards, and just chatted away with the clerk. He told us that occasionally alligators will sunbathe in the parking lot and since there is no post office lobby, visitors need to wait to get out of their cars. A post office in the Everglades..."Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds." Add alligators to Ochopee's mission.

Whenever we are away from the house for more than a couple days, I use the USPS Mail Hold Service to pause our mail delivery. Back in the day, I remember going to the post office, filling out a card, and handing it to the clerk for a mail hold. Nowadays, holding mail is done online in a matter of a minute or two. This past mail hold lasted for a couple weeks. When we got home from Florida, the postman had placed our mostly two weeks of junk mail on the front porch and it was there waiting for us. There were a couple relevant things but the ads, flyers, solicitations, credit card apps, and whatever else either went right to the recycle bin or through the shredder. Getting mail used to be fun. Now it's an exercise in sorting. I walk to the mail box through the garage, come back, stop at the recycle bin and most days nothing makes it into the house. In a few days, a keeper piece of mail will arrive. I bought an Ochopee post card and sent it to my house!