postage due

"What on earth do you islanders do during the winter?" the tourists used to ask the postmistress.
"We knit seaweed," she retorted.
The postmistress lay in a casket covered with a quilt of hands holding hands yesterday. She had died, rather quickly, of lung cancer. Apparently she smoked the evil weed during those long winters, too.
But for all her tart tongue, she was one of the very few islanders who welcomed outsiders, even foreigners and Jews. She knew everybody, and everybody knew her.
Why I can't stop today: I've got to collect a hank of seaweed.