The route pays 10 cents per house, and we do 720 houses.

Delivering newsletters. So here we are. Most of what I know about Calgary, I know from helping my son with this route.

I like it. Delivering mail is great exercise but has some risk.

Most mailboxes are up stairs of some sort: steep ones, concrete ones, icy ones, flimsy wood ones.

Then there’s an array of mailboxes: some wide and big, others are too teensy to stuff the mail in, or you push the newsletter through a door slot to where a dog just about bites your hand off.

(Action item. We’ve since moved our own mailbox to ground level.)

And those 50-foot lots. Urban sprawl! 

We understand the city’s hunger for density. The more spread out, the harder to provide services. We rejoice when one house has four mailboxes. Forty cents compared to 10.

Winter makes everything harder – and slower. We watch city crews fix a burst water main. We move with care. Some people shovel their walks; some don’t.

The obvious rentals, and you just know them when you see them, have walks that aren’t touched. Yet there are fancy duplexes where one person shovels only their half.

And developers? Not one under-construction house ever has a sidewalk that’s shovelled. Ever. So we walk on the road, icy but less icy.

Turn the corner and there’s a sign on a chainlink fence announcing a tree is worth $350. Except there’s no tree. The developer cut it down. Scorched earth. Icy sidewalk.

Here’s a school. Once public, it’s now a charter school. The type where parents are up at midnight refreshing their computer to get their kid admitted to kindergarten. It’s a symbol of the times for the inner city flush with school closures. The city and public school boards can’t get together to make inner city density and schools work. So more schools open in the sprawling ‘burbs in contrast to city density efforts.

Everywhere, ice is the enemy. It lurks under snow, and, boom, I’m down, hard on my hip. My son trips on a stair and hurts his arm. So if Canada Posties earn $20-plus an hour, more power to them.

That’s what you’ll think when the fall is yours. The category “slips, trips and falls” is their leading cause of injury.

My son quits. “I’m a kid, it’s winter and I don’t want a job.”

When the cheque comes, he owes me $30.