It doesn’t take much to make me decide not to do something I didn’t want to do in the first place. I wasn’t keen on going out in the rain today, especially after the very loud thunder and the very bright lightning that visited us this morning. Or was visited on us, maybe I should say. The wind was blowing the trees sideways, and my big, drafty house never seemed quite so cozy.

So I was debating indifferently whether to venture out to the post office. I didn’t have any urgent outgoing mail, so there was no overriding imperative. I have this thing about mail, though. The one thing I don’t like about holidays is that there’s no mail delivery, and I’m a little obsessive about picking up my mail every day.

Not today. Not after Tammy phoned and told me that my street (the one I use to get to the post office) was flooded. She had got through in her SUV, and I’m sure my Saturn would have made it, but I wasn’t very interested in proving it. All I wanted was to stay home where it was warm and dry and safe, and it didn’t take much to get me to make that choice. It never does, when it’s what I really want to do.

But I did bundle up this afternoon and wade out through the muddy driveway to the road and take the mail out of my box. In this case, the imperative is that the mailbox has a tiny leak, and the longer my mail stays in it, the greater the chance that it will get soaked and become unreadable. And anyway, I survived the ordeal, but by that time the rain had become a little more manageable — big drops, but spaced out better. I didn’t even wear a hat.