The registration sticker

Postage stamps ask for one lick and then a lifetime of irrelevance; the registration sticker asks for a full year of direct exposure to weather, road salt, and a windshield's worth of ultraviolet light before anyone notices it has started to lift. It occupies the same corner of the plate every year, stacked over its own predecessor going back a decade in counties too thrifty to scrape the old ones off first. A single peeling corner, curling away from the plate like the edge of a bandage left on through too many showers, is the sticker's most common late-life posture. A single walk down one block of parallel parking can turn up eleven of them curling at the corner, more than expected, fewer than suspected. The color changes each year specifically so an officer glancing at a bumper from a moving car can tell current from expired without reading a single number, a design choice that demands almost nothing of human attention and gets almost everything it needs from it. Renewal notices arrive by mail with a new sticker taped to the top corner of the form, small enough to lose in a stack of other mail before the deadline registers. Applying one is not, by any account, satisfying. It goes on in four seconds, sits through four seasons of weather nobody designed it to survive gracefully, and comes off, when it comes off at all, in flakes too small to read.

Arthur Pell