For 45 years, she kept the Virgil community in Niagara-on-the-Lake connected. Now, the beloved postmaster is taking a well-earned bow.
After decades of service at the Canada Post location on 2 Lorraine St., Cindy Andrews-Friesen is beginning a new chapter — one that includes more family time, reading and, as she puts it, sleeping in.
Andrews-Friesen retired as the post office’s postmaster last week, closing a career that began in April 1980.
“It feels good,” she said. “I love sleeping in. It’s nice, I can do what I want — pick my grandsons up at daycare if I want to.”
Becoming postmaster in 2014, Andrews-Friesen, now 65, said what stands out most from her decades on the job aren’t specific projects, but the people she worked with and served in the community: “They’re still friends.”
Andrews-Friesen said, besides the fact that stamp prices have gone up tenfold since she started, the job kept the same spirit over the years, so she never considered doing anything else. Postal strikes, she said, never affected the Virgil office.
An accomplishment for her has been watching many of the people she mentored grow and succeed in their own paths, she said.
“I really don’t want to pat myself on the back, but I mean, a lot of the people that have worked for me — and I’ve kind of trained them — have now become postmasters themselves,” she said.
To those just starting out at Canada Post, her advice is simple: “Be kind to people.”
“With the world we live in now,” she said, “I just think if you’re kind to people, people will be kind to you.”
That outlook, she said, is especially important in a small town like NOTL.
Over her decades at the Virgil office, Andrews-Friesen came to know generations of families, many who came in daily to collect their mail and chat.
Asked what she will miss most, Andrews-Friesen didn’t hesitate: “The people,” she said, one of them being her longtime colleague and friend Brenda Ferguson, assistant to the postmaster.
Their friendship began when Ferguson moved to Virgil in 2016 and got a P.O. box at the office, where the two first met.
A year later, Ferguson joined the staff and worked alongside Andrews-Friesen until her retirement — a friendship that has lasted ever since.
“Every other day I’m on the phone with her,” Andrews-Friesen said.
Ferguson told The Lake Report that Andrews-Friesen cared about her team beyond the workplace — always checking in, listening and making sure everyone was doing well both on and off the job.
“I’m raising kids,” said Ferguson. “If I was going through something with teenagers, she would, kind of, tell me her stories.”
“She always just made it feel like it’s okay.”
During hectic pandemic days, Ferguson said Andrews-Friesen would remind the team to slow down and remember, “There’s tomorrow.”
She was known at the office for her thoughtful acts of kindness: giving seniors rides home during outages or checking in on customers after a fall, Ferguson said.
“She didn’t second-guess it,” said Ferguson. “She did these things because she cares about people.”
“She’ll say she’s not, but she was like, the best teacher,” added Ferguson. “She really wanted to make sure that everyone else around her succeeded.”
Ferguson said her supportive, calm and patient approach helped many colleagues go on to become postmasters themselves.
When asked how the team will carry on that perspective, Ferguson said they now joke and ask themselves, “What would Cindy do?” whenever challenges come up.
She said what matters most “is going back and thinking about all the things that she’s taught us.”
Now retired, Andrews-Friesen plans to celebrate with the people who turned workdays into friendships. “We’re all going out for dinner in a couple weeks,” she said.
She said she has no plans to leave NOTL, the community that made her career so meaningful, she said.
“I never even think of moving,” she added. “Unless my kids moved far away.”
As she looks ahead, her deliveries take a different form — a hug for a grandchild, a call to an old coworker — each one likely marked by the same care that left an impact on everyone who crossed her path.
