A childhood belief about in the street

Across the road from where I lived as a kid there was a house with a giant white concrete wall out the front. In this wall they had placed rows and rows of sectioned earthenware pipes perpendicular to the wall, in all there were about six rows of twenty pipe sections. This created a cheesy quasi Spanish effect and the whole neighbourhood quietly laughed about it. My mum once joked that they often went on holiday and built that wall so their mailbox wouldn't clog up every time they delivered the local paper, I missed the humour and totally believed this. Just this year I moved to a house near this wall and while driving past with my girlfriend I *almost* said, "hey, there's the wall of the people who always go on holiday".