The following is a recollection from the creator: "Mailbox at the Farm. I once made a little drawing of one of the most familiar sights that I remember from growing up on the farm. How many times in those years did I look out the living room window of the farmhouse, looking directly west across the fields, to the farm of my cousin Gail Olson? All the seasons of the year, and all the times of the day, I knew that my cousin was nearby. Gail’s grandmother Lizzie and my grandfather Will were sister and brother.

The mailbox, standing to this day, was a reminder that even out in the country we were connected to a larger world. So much depended on the mailbox and coming of the mailman. A walk across the yard to the mailbox, late morning before lunch, was travel that lasted a lifetime for my father and mother, and was what I knew of travel when young.

Do we not still wait for the delivery that will take us, however far and briefly, to another place? And back home we savor the moments of transport—and of return."

Most of the text is from Richard Quinney, “A Place Called Home,” Tales From the Middle Border. Madison, WI: Borderland Books, 2007, pp. 1-38 (Originally published in the Wisconsin Magazine of History, 67 (Spring 1984), pp. 163-184.