On the Long Road

To you, on the road,

Welcome to the Storm Post Office. This letter is sent from the Western Front in the autumn of 1920, and the guns have not yet fallen silent. The envelope is olive field paper, rough-fibred, with a hand-cut woodblock serif title bitten into it. Black angular lines draw a ruined landscape, a few torn fragments of a route map lie in cream, and beside a rust-red civilian postmark, near the edge, a small warm farmhouse light is printed.

A poet who loved the roads of his own country once mourned one he could not walk back along: “That is the land of lost content, / I see it shining plain, / The happy highways where I went / And cannot come again.” — A. E. Housman, A Shropshire Lad (1896)

A highway cannot be walked backwards, but a letter can go back along it. You need not hurry. Write in the rain, slowly, and we will carry it home.

May there always be a lamp by the road

Storm Post Office

Autumn 1920 · Western Front