I live near the still-so-named "Boston Post Road" in SE Connecticut, also known as U.S. Route 1. It predates the interstate I-95 by a century or two, and winds along the U.S East Coast connecting all the cities on the original colonial seaboard.

Its name, the "Post Road", reminds the historically minded of us that this was Ben Franklin's effort at regularizing a horse-friendly 'road' that would connect Portland, Portsmouth, Boston, Providence, New Haven, Stamford (yay!), New York, Newark, Trenton, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Norfolk, and points South (forgive me if I don't know for sure the names) all the way (later) to eastern Florida.

Now the Post Road is a stoplight-ridden traffic jam on a moment's notice. That's why they built I-95! But to drive along it is to remember the horsed postal riders on an open dirt trail who carried the mail - letters and newspapers - from colony to colony, city to city, in the unacknowledged cause of American nationalism back in the 1700s and early 1800s.

Thanks for this break in favor of history and against any talk of today's politics.