Hi, I’m Linda. For 28 years I carried mail on a rural route in Iowa, and you learn a lot about people from what they wait for at the mailbox. I retired at 60. At 61, I joined a Tuesday weights class at our rec center.
What I write about
Where my stories come from
The best part of the route was the mail nobody expected: a postcard from a grandkid, a seed catalog in July. My husband says I sort the newspaper the same way, good news on top.
Our Tuesday class has eight regulars, and I’m the second youngest. The oldest is 84. She counts every rep out loud and never loses track, and on my first day she told me the mail route didn’t count, because “the mail never fought back.”
How I write
Plain talk, real numbers, no medical advice. I don’t say “at my age” much, and I don’t plan to start.
Off the clock
I live in a small town near Ames with my husband, Gary. Our daughter and her three kids live in Des Moines, where I’m on call as the backup tooth fairy. I bought my first kayak secondhand at 61. It has been on four lakes and one very confused river.
How we check our stories: Editorial Standards and Ethics.
I’ve been the tooth fairy for two generations: at 50 cents a tooth for my own kids in the ’90s, and now as occasional backup for three grandkids in Des Moines, where the rate has gone up considerably. These 11 tooth fairy letters and family traditions, from a mouse in Spain to a magpie in Korea, show how far parents go for one small tooth.
On my rural mail route, a farmer named Arnie met the truck at his box at 11:40 every day, and on his 90th birthday he was out at 11:38, running ahead now, he said. He did a little two-step when the cards outnumbered the bills. Dick Van Dyke turned 100 last December, and these 12 things he says and does show he never planned to slow down either.
