This is one of my favourite stamps. I picked it up at the Spellman Museum of Stamps and Postal History, just outside Boston. A whole building given over to stamps, which tells you a lot about me and how I spend my spare time. A stamp of Cape Cod, bought just over an hour’s drive from Cape Cod. It felt like the right place to find it.
United States, 2011. A Forever stamp from the American Treasures series. The picture is a painting by Edward Hopper called The Long Leg, made in 1935 off Cape Cod, where he spent his summers.
There is not much in it. A sailboat leaning into the wind. A strip of pale sand. A flat lilac sky. And over on the left, sitting low on the point, a white lighthouse and its keeper’s house. Long Point Light, at the very tip of the Cape.
Hopper is famous for loneliness. Diners at night. Women at windows. Empty rooms with the sun coming in. People look at his paintings and feel a little sad, and I understand why.
This one doesn’t make me sad at all.
The long leg is a sailor’s phrase. It is the long stretch of a course, the part where you settle on one heading and hold it. No drama. No turning. Just the boat, the wind and the patience to keep going.
Look at where the light falls. It is on the sail, bright and full. The lighthouse is off to one side, small and plain, not the subject at all. It is simply there. Keeping watch over a boat that, on a day like this, doesn’t need it.
Down the right-hand edge, in tall thin letters, the stamp says FOREVER. That is a postal term. A Forever stamp is always worth a first-class letter, however much the price goes up. It never loses its value.
Most of life is the long leg. Not the big turns we remember. The steady stretches in between, holding a heading.
Forever, it says. I’ll take that.
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