The Road Back Home

To you, on the road home,

Welcome to the Storm Post Office. This letter was written in the last weeks of 1920, in the Don country, where frost has just come down and the river bends its way through the steppe. The envelope is forest-green paper with the grain of cloth; the carved lettering, warm and plain, looks chiselled from wood; a cream woodcut shows the steppe and a winding river; a restrained folk-woven border in ochre and rust holds the edge, and an off-white band of medical cloth runs across it like a freshly tied bandage.

A poet once wrote of riding a cart down a country road at night, peering into the dark: “…sighing for a night’s lodging, to meet along the roadside the trembling lights of sad villages.” — Mikhail Lermontov, Motherland (1841)

None of those lights was lit for him, yet each made the road a little shorter. The road is long and our letters are slow. Write one when you feel like it.

With a lamp at every bend

Storm Post Office

Late 1920 · The Don country