Special Delivery

Stephen Starring Grant ’92 has a new mailbox. What might seem an inane replacement to a homeowner is so much more to Grant, a former rural mail carrier with the U.S. Postal Service. Grant waxes poetic about the Gibraltar galvanized elite rural mailbox, which looks to the layman like a black lunch pail on steroids. He points out how much it can hold; the fact that it won’t rust; the fortress’s ability to keep insects, wasps and spiders at bay; and the high contrast of the white, reflective numbering on the side of the box. 

“Your letter carrier loves this. Why?” Grant asks in an Instagram video. “Because almost anything other than like a minifridge from Amazon is going to fit in here. It’s going to be dry. It’s going to be safe. So I am, along with many rural carriers, a big fan of the Gibraltar rural, what they call the ‘farmer’s mailbox.’”

What mailbox proves best is just one of the many lessons Grant learned during his year of delivering the mail in 2020. At the beginning of that year, he was a 50-year-old marketing consultant. But once COVID-19 hit and the agency he was working for closed shop, he found himself jobless — part of the millions of Americans who were out of work in the pandemic’s first three months. Grant, who was living with his wife and two daughters in his hometown of Blacksburg, Va., also had prostate cancer, so he needed to find a job with insurance. It wasn’t long before he had joined the U.S. Postal Service and was delivering letters and packages along the roads he’d grown up traversing. But even with that intimacy and despite living there, Grant learned that for some time he had been at a distance with his homeland. And the routes that year allowed him an opportunity to rediscover the Appalachian landscape around him as well as its people, his neighbors.

Grant has captured that rediscovery and the tales of his routes during his year as a postal carrier in his memoir, Mailman: My Wild Ride Delivering the Mail in Appalachia and Finally Finding Home. The book paints a portrait of how hard the job can be as Grant battles everything from a hornet’s nest, angry dogs, skeptical co-workers and customers who ordered everything from books, appliances, chicken feed, inflatable pools and swords, to video games, art supplies and weed. Despite all the lessons he learns and packages he delivers correctly, he serves up a humble admission a third of the way through the book. “The truth was,” he writes, “that I was never a very good mailman.”

NC State magazine caught up with Grant in Blacksburg last fall, as he revisited his old mail routes (since 2021, he has returned to work in marketing). Grant’s routes stretched through a bucolic valley of pasture lands and horse farms nestled between Brush and Christiansburg mountains. It was on those routes that he — armed with Slim Jims, Gatorade and a seven-hour Spotify playlist featuring everyone from the Breeders to Sturgill Simpson — drove at what his two daughters classified as backroad warp drive on rides that follow the New River. Those roads bring everyone together, as Grant says, “cheek by jowl,” with folks from different socioeconomic backgrounds and across the political spectrum living beside one another along creeks and in hollows, whose entrances housed parcel lockers where Grant would leave their packages.

One of the major themes of Mailman is the idea of service. Did your year of delivering the mail change your perspective on service?
It was a recalibration. I think I’d become inured to blue-collar people and people in positions of service, in which I put teachers, fire and rescue workers, but also people driving trucks to make sure there’s food on the shelves at our stores and linemen and the folks that keep the internet running. … There’s an assumption that somehow you fall into it, that this stuff is all magically happening. And it’s like, “No. People are working hard every day to create this country.” Those essential workers, if they had packed it in, it’s lights out. We went to work and stayed at work and kept the country going until everyone could return to normal life. It did radically alter my perspective.

“Those essential workers, if they had packed it in, it’s lights out. We went to work and stayed at work and kept the country going until everyone could return to normal life.”
— Stephen Starring Grant ’92

You showed up your first day at the Blacksburg, Va., post office with a leather briefcase and a cup of coffee, and your new colleagues were wary. Then you overheard them talking about you, and they knew everything about you from delivering mail to your house in the past. How disarming an experience was that?
It was a sensation of nothing other than alarm. I was like, “Well, of course this lady knows everything about me.” She knows all my magazines. She sees my house every day … [for at least] five days a week. She knows the cars I own. She knew I had two little girls. …  It was like, “These people really do have a fine-grained sense of who I am.” … Your letter carrier sees that, how you treat your pet, how you talk to your kids and your spouse, when you think nobody’s looking. 

[When I was delivering mail,] I walked up to this one house, and this father and his son were building an addition onto their house. And I saw the way the two of them were working together, and I thought, “This is a healthy family.” There’s a lot of respect and love happening between this father and this son, the way they’re working together. It’s just the interaction I saw, but I thought it was a quite telling one.

You spend time exploring imposter syndrome in the book in terms of being a mail carrier and then in terms of your Appalachian identity. The second one certainly seemed harder for you to unpack. 
My old man was not a coal miner. We didn’t lay railroad. But the Grants have lived in this part of the world for longer than there has been an America, and so it’s like, “Who gets to say that they’re Appalachian?”… My father was an engineering professor. But, you know, I grew up walking these hills. I fished all my life. And I consider myself, culturally, to be Appalachian, and I became not just comfortable with that, but proud about it.

And maybe part of that, too, was getting to know the place where you’ve lived for so long but maybe didn’t truly “know” until you drove those mail routes?
You’re seeing the terrain down at the mailbox level, and you’re doing it slow. You’re going up to people’s homes, and you get such a zoomed-in view of life, house by house, street by street, hollow by hollow.

Seeing it at that level afforded you the chance to build relationships with your mail customers, too. What did those connections reveal?
The postal service is part of that. It’s just people seeing you, meeting you. And for me, my experience in the pandemic was really different [than most people’s]. I wasn’t isolated at home. I got to see people all around my community. I was proof the outside world kept going. And I do think that the fact that I was — however lowly and about as low as it could get — a representative of their government, and I was there for them, it’s just like, “Hey man, this is going to be over. We’re going to get through this.” And in many ways, it was the most valuable thing I did.

“I wasn’t isolated at home. I got to see people all around my community. I was proof the outside world kept going.”
— Stephen Starring Grant ’92

You got to experience a deeper connection with your own family, too. You write about calling your two daughters, who were 14 and 12 at the time, into service as by-proxy mail carriers to go out on your routes with you. What did that time mean?
The time delivering mail with them was my favorite time as their father. I thought, “I will never get this time again,” but also, “I got to do this.” I wasn’t just trapped in an office throughout their entire childhood. I had this experience of living with them, day to day, and working together. It was an incredible privilege for me when I had a fellow come up to me and say, “You know, everybody here in the neighborhood, we look forward to it every day, you and your girls coming through.” There were many times during that year delivering the mail that I had the sense that I was inside something very special, and a special time in my life, my girls’ lives and the country’s life.

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From MAILMAN: My Wild Ride Delivering the Mail in Appalachia and Finally Finding Home by Stephen Starring Grant. Copyright © 2025 by Stardust73 LLC. Reprinted by permission of Simon & Schuster, LLC.

It’s that very sense of connection that Grant underscores in the two passages from Mailman we’ve chosen to run as excerpts along with our Q&A. In the first, Grant encounters an older, independent woman of Appalachia who accepts his help with her packages of chicken feed he has delivered. And in the second passage, Grant gets to see his customers’ empathy as they provide and care for him.

This was the address I was looking for. I still couldn’t see any sign of human habitation, but this had to be the place.

Another fifty yards and things opened up into a small field holding a cozy house, saddle land on top of the mountain. There was a big equipment shed with a John Deere tractor and a Bobcat excavator, and a dirt lot with two old Chevy pickups and a very well-loved 1990s burnt-orange 4Runner. Two small corgis started barking at me before I even had the ignition turned off. I dropped the tailgate, got the first bag up onto my shoulder, and walked it the rest of the way to the front porch.

An old woman, an Appalachian survivor in sneakers and blue jeans, all smiles, opened the front door.

“United States Postal Service, ma’am.”

“Oh my goodness. Nobody comes up here. Nobody. Hell, you’re the first person I’ve seen that isn’t kin since all of this started. Of course, it’s the post office. You all are the only ones with any guts. The rest of them won’t even try it in their fancy trucks.”

“Where are your coops? I’m happy to carry this down for you.”

“If you would carry it down, well, it would be a kindness. I have to use a wheelbarrow these days.” This woman barely reached five feet tall. She lived alone. She was straight-no-chaser mountain tough, the genuine article, and would have lugged those bags down herself if I hadn’t offered. She had the usual assortment of self-sufficiency tools I had come to recognize by now — cords of firewood, a woodshed, a hydraulic log splitter, her own gas and diesel tanks. Maybe helpful grandsons came to run all this heavy equipment for her on Sunday afternoons, but I suspect she could run every bit of it herself.

“I wouldn’t turn down that wheelbarrow, ma’am. That way I can do all three bags at once. Just let me get my work gloves.”

Down past her home was a shallow grassy hill. The left side of the meadow held a pen with goats, pink ribbons tied in the hair of one of them. At the downhill end of the field was the biggest home chicken coop setup I’d ever seen. This wasn’t a hobby, but rather had the look of something being done in deadly earnest. 

“You raising these eggs to sell?”

“Got nobody to sell them to, so I mostly eat them myself and give them to my kids.”

I rolled the bags down to the storage shed that held all her chicken-keeping stuff, the craft of raising birds a mystery to me.

“There you go ma’am. You want this back up at the top of the hill?”

“I feel bad for asking. Let me get you a glass of water.”

I pushed the wheelbarrow back up the hill and tipped it up against the equipment shed where I found it. When I turned around, she was standing there with a glass of water and a paper bag.

“There’s some eggs for you and your family. God bless you, young man,” she said, and laid her hand on my arm in that grandmotherly way. 

This tough, independent old lady was a pretty different creature than my granny, who wore white gloves and a hat when she left the house. She was much more like my mamaw from West Virginia. Mamaw knew birds, drank bourbon neat, drove a Thunderbird, lived by herself, and only asked for help when she really needed it, like when Dad and I drove up to Charleston to replace her hot water heater. I had thought women like that might have been a thing of the past, but they weren’t. That toughness lived on, and it was the most hopeful thing I’d encountered in a season that hadn’t been long on hope. When this mountain woman handed me those eggs for my family and told me “God bless you” something deep twanged inside me. Instead of getting choked up in front of a stranger, I just touched the brim of my hat and got back into the truck while my composure still held. For the rest of the day everything else was as light as a feather. I’d have carried chicken feed for her every day of my life. It was my great privilege to do it as her mailman.

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Rural carriers didn’t avoid injury, they just got different ones. Blown-out lower backs from sitting splay-legged in privately owned cars. Torn rotator cuffs and neck injuries from driving with your left hand and then reaching across your body and behind you, over and over. The rural carriers weren’t as lean as the city carriers, in part because they simply didn’t get the walking. My soft information-worker hands got rougher. My grip got strong enough that I could pinch large parcels by their edge and carry them that way. 

To every physical test there is a season. The heat of summer stops being a conversation point and becomes something to survive. Forget hot yoga. Until you’ve spent a ten-hour day in an aluminum box being heated by the sun, you have not been hot. If I saw a hose in a customer’s yard, I would sometimes just hold my head under it. The way my blood would cool would give a whole-body high, the relief was so great. I learned to keep a mini cooler with me in the mail truck, loaded with ice. I’d keep frozen bottles of water and Gatorade in there too. I’d cut the Gatorade fifty-fifty with water, because it’s actually too salty right out of the bottle — you’ll lose water drinking it.

There were customers, beloved customers, who would leave coolers on their porch for us. Coach Fuente did not distinguish himself as the football coach at Virginia Tech, but his wife had built an aid station for us on her front porch — a big cooler full of all sorts of drinks, particularly the letter carrier favorite, Frost Cherry Gatorade. She also left out Nabs, candy, gum, even Chapsticks. I never met her in person, but I would have crawled under machine-gun fire to deliver her mail, simply for that thoughtful act of human kindness. Her packages were laid on the ground like each and every one of them contained a million-dollar Ming vase. I did my damnedest to be gentle with all my customers’ packages, but I’d be lying if I said I treated her the same as all the rest.

I had some customers on my Aux route down near Merrimac who, in the winter, would put out hot coffee in a thermos and donuts. I ran into them one morning, drinking coffee and taking in the sun on a warm day in a cold season. They were a young, good-looking couple, with toddlers. And they still took the time to leave something out for us carriers, to notice our humanity.

“Hey Mr. Mailman, can we pour you a cup of coffee?”

“I will never turn down coffee,” I said. “I just don’t have a cup.”

“Oh don’t worry about that. Take a mug and just leave it in the mailbox next time you come through.”

Kat was the career carrier on the route, and when I mentioned the couple, her face lit up. A cup of coffee goes a long way in a cold world.

To those folks down on Merrimac Road, to Mrs. Fuente, and all the others who took care of us that long, overloaded pandemic year, I want you to know that Saint Gabriel, the patron saint of letter carriers, is waiting to wave you through the pearly gates to your special place in heaven. We took notice of your kindness and we loved you for it. 

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