Repositories of the Morning Mail

Repositories of the morning mail

The air was crisp in the rural village, where I sketched these mail boxes.  Frost lay on the ground, like millions of tiny diamonds, sparkling in the those first rays of a burnt orange sun, heaving itself above the distant horizon.
My fingers were blue with the cold, and I was blowing on them when a stranger appeared at my side, for a chat.  I thrust my hands deep into my pockets for a bit of warmth.
While we exchanged a few pleasantries, such as the state of the economy and the mothering instincts of a clay pigeon, he appeared to be dying to ask what I was doing, as if it wasn't all that obvious.
He eventually got around to suggesting the landscape was quite something around this neck of the woods.  "Yes,"  I said,  "but I am not looking at the landscape, it's those old letter boxes I am interested in."  I opened up my sketch book.
"Good God man," he stuttered, his teeth chattering with the cold.   Shaking his head in disbelief, "what the hell do you see in those old things?"
For some reason, he then seemed to lose interest in me, and with a quick, " see ya," he wandered off in the direction of what I assumed to be his home.
As he crossed the veranda, I heard him saying to someone beyond my line of sight. " Would you believe it, that dickhead over there is drawing those old mailboxes!"
I had a bit of a smile, for that bloke was probably right about me being a dickhead, sitting out there on my stool in the cold and freezing to death.  But then, I was not concerned, I was sitting there in the cold because, most of all, I enjoyed what I was doing.  I saw numerous shapes and sizes that appealed to me.  One or two of those boxes appeared to newish, introducing recent immigrants to the district, while others proudly displayed the battle scars, due to there years of conflict with the elements.
My visitor had obviously lived here for a number of years and took the sight of these repositories of the morning mail for granted.