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SUNDAY. No mail on Sunday. You're looking at a mailbox, a road, and the woods across the road. That's all you'll see till Monday unless something with four legs comes by. I leave it running on Sundays one picture an hour, mostly out of habit.

My name is Mitchell Deford. I'm 63 and retired. I climbed poles and spliced cable for the telephone company here in south-central Kentucky for 35 years, from 1961 till 1996. My wife Wilma and I live at the top of a gravel lane that runs 300 feet down the hill to the state road, and the mailbox is at the bottom. Three hundred feet is nothing on the way down. On the way back up, at 63, with two bad knees and no mail in your hand because she hasn't come yet, it is a long way. After about the fortieth time I did that, I put a camera on the mailbox.

HOW TO READ IT

PEGGY

Peggy is our rural carrier, and has been for nine years. She drives her own car, the little maroon one with the amber light stuck on the roof, and she sits over on the right side of the seat so she can reach the boxes out the passenger window. I asked her once how she reaches the pedals from over there. She said, "Carefully." She has 400-some boxes on her route and she knows every dog on it by name.

SAT 09-25-99 11:48:12. There she is.

Yesterday, Saturday, 11:48, right on time. That's her arm out the window with the mail. Saturdays are light, and she likes to get done.

WHEN DOES SHE COME?

I write down the time on the first picture her car shows up in. I've done it every mail day since the camera went on, April 19 through yesterday: 135 days, not counting Sundays, Memorial Day, the Fourth (the Monday after) and Labor Day. Averages by month, and a bar for each, one mark per minute after 11:40:

MONTH  DAYS  AVG
APR*    11  11:47  #######
MAY     25  11:50  ##########
JUN     26  11:58  ##################
JUL     26  11:53  #############
AUG     26  11:51  ###########
SEP**   21  11:50  ##########
----   ---  -----
ALL    135  11:52

 * from 04-19   ** through 09-25

EARLIEST  11:14  SAT 05-08-99
LATEST     2:40  SAT 06-12-99

June runs late on account of one day. On Friday, June 11, a hailstorm came through in the afternoon and laid trees across half the roads in the county. Peggy got to us at 2:40 the next day, Saturday, the latest she's ever been, with a dent in her hood the size of a golf ball. The earliest was a Saturday in May, 11:14. I believe she skipped her lunch.

WHAT ELSE IT'S SEEN

TUE 04-27-99  09:12  RED FOX (1ST)
FRI 05-21-99  10:31  WREN TAIL,
                     HALF THE PICTURE
WED 06-02-99  13:05  LOOSE HEIFER, ATE
                     THE CHICORY
THU 07-15-99  09:40  RED FOX (2ND)
THU 08-12-99  12:41  SCHOOL BUS,
                     1ST DAY HALF DAY
TUE 09-14-99  09:04  RED FOX (3RD)
DAILY      ABT 09:30 ROWDY

TUE 09-14-99 09:04:31. Fox, third time.

The fox came by again on a gray morning two weeks ago, trotting along the shoulder like he had an appointment. Three times now, all of them between nine and ten in the morning. I think he works the ditch along the road for mice. He looked right at the camera this time. I don't believe he can see it.

The heifer belongs down the road. The school bus doesn't normally come by in camera hours, but on the first day of school they let out at noon. Rowdy is our neighbor Allen Ince's beagle, and he comes down every morning about 9:30, checks the post, and leaves his opinion of it. Allen says he's the only one on the road who reads his mail before he gets it.

HOW I BUILT IT

Thirty-five years I put wire where the company wanted it. This spring I put some where I wanted it.

• The birdhouse. Cedar, out of one six-foot board, on the fence post four feet behind and to one side of the mailbox. The camera sits inside looking out a little window of Plexiglas in the side. The front hole is real, and in May a pair of wrens tried to move in, which is the tail you'd have seen on May 21. I plugged the hole and they built in the woodpile.
• The camera. A little color security camera out of an electronics catalog, the kind that's just a board and a lens. It runs on 12 volts.
• The cable. In April I dug a trench 18 inches deep up the whole lane, 312 feet as it turned out, and laid gray plastic conduit with coaxial cable for the picture and a pair of wires for the 12 volts. I did it with a mattock and a borrowed trencher over three days. Wilma brought tea. My knees have not forgiven me.
• The computer. In the spare bedroom. The coax goes into a video card that takes TV and camera signals, and a shareware program grabs a picture every minute and sends it to this page over the phone line.

Cost me less than a new pair of boots, if you don't count the knees.

WHAT WILMA THINKS

Wilma says a man who climbed poles through two ice storms and a tornado ought to be able to walk 300 feet for the mail, and that a grown man watching a mailbox on a computer is about the silliest thing she's seen in 41 years of marriage, and she's seen me try to fix a clothes dryer. All of that is true. I will tell you that she checks the camera before I do.

VISITORS SINCE 04-19-99


Write me: [email protected]
LAST UPDATED SUN 09-26-99