About Beth & the Mother Road

My name is Beth. I’ve lived in this town for a long time now. Long enough that the people at the post office know what I’m mailing without asking, and the woman who runs the diner pours my coffee before I sit down. It’s the kind of place that gets called sleepy, which is unfair, because it’s never been sleepy. It’s just quiet. There’s a difference.

Route 66 runs right through here. The old highway is two blocks from my back door. Some days I forget it’s there. Other days I sit on the porch with a sketchbook and watch the cars going west, and I think about all the places that road has been since 1926, all the gas stations and motels and roadside churches that grew up along the edges of it, most of them gone now and a few of them stubbornly, beautifully still here.

I’ve been making art since I was a kid. For a long time it was just for me — a sketchbook on the kitchen table, watercolors set up on the dryer in the back room, prints I’d run off and tape to the walls. I started selling at a little market in town a few years back, mostly because a friend dragged me there. People liked the work. They’d buy a print and tell me a story about a road trip they took with their dad, or a motel they stayed at on their honeymoon, and I started realizing that what I was making wasn’t really about the buildings. It was about the feeling of a place that’s been there a while and remembers things.

Mother Road Mailroom started because my friend Drew and I were talking about how nobody sends real mail anymore. He runs the business side. I make the work and write the letters. The idea is simple: once a month, an envelope shows up at your house with a print I made, a letter I wrote, a coloring page, and a couple of stickers. That’s it. No app, no scrolling, nothing to charge. Just an envelope.

I think about Route 66 the way some people think about a song they’ve known their whole life. It’s got verses I love and verses I don’t care for and a chorus I can’t shake. The mailroom is my way of sharing it with people who still care about getting something handmade in the mail. If that’s you, I’d love to write to you. Bring a coffee cup. Take your time.

— Beth

A two-block downtown, a diner, and the old highway.

The town is small enough that you can walk every street in an afternoon. There’s a downtown, a hardware store that’s been there since before my grandparents were born, a diner with the best pie within a hundred miles, and a stretch of the old road that locals still call “Main” even though the official name is something else entirely.

[Photo of Main Street]

[Photo of the diner counter]

It’s the kind of town where the sky takes up more than its share of the view. Wide skies, slow weather, a freight train that goes through at 4:17 every morning. The work I make comes from sitting still in it long enough to start noticing things — the way the paint peels on a particular shed, the angle of the cottonwoods at the edge of the field behind the elementary school, the light at the gas pumps after a rain.

Because some things shouldn’t open in a tab.

[Photo of Beth’s studio]

[Photo of Beth at the desk]

I’m not against the internet. I’m on it like everyone else. But I think a lot of us have noticed that the digital version of getting a letter from someone — a notification, a preview, a thumbnail — doesn’t feel like getting a letter from someone. It feels like a chore that’s pretending to be a gift.

An envelope is different. It’s got weight. It came from a person who handled it. You open it standing at the mailbox, or at the kitchen counter, or on the porch with a cup of coffee. You don’t skim it. There’s no next one queued up behind it. When you’re done, you put it somewhere — taped to the fridge, in a kitchen drawer, on the corkboard above the desk — and it stays. That’s the whole pitch. Real mail is slow and it stays.

We’re bringing real mail back. Not because the digital stuff is bad, but because the slow stuff is good, and there isn’t much of it left.

Andy “Drew” Waltrip handles the back room.

Beth is the artist and the writer and the face of this thing. I’m the friend who keeps the website upright, runs the spreadsheets, makes sure your envelope actually goes in the mail on time, and handles the part of small-business life that doesn’t come naturally to artists. If you ever email and the reply sounds a little less Beth and a little more practical, that’s probably me.

— Drew

I make art in a small town on Route 66. This is where it comes from.

A two-block downtown, a diner, and the old highway.

Because some things shouldn’t open in a tab.

Andy “Drew” Waltrip handles the back room.

Want some of this in your mailbox?