“Pinky” was created as a collaborative family project during the first year of the pandemic. Kevin Knight’s daughter Kelsey was on a furlough between her nursing job in NYC and a new nursing position in California. She decided to relocate to the west coast having witnessed a great deal of carnage in New York but had a couple weeks before her nursing license would be activated in California and so Kelsey decided to spend this time with her parents on Bainbridge Island.

Kevin says of her winter visit, “It was typical Bainbridge weather, which is to say a good time to be doing indoor projects.” The mailbox they’d inherited with the house when they moved here ten years ago from Texas, was in bad shape, describing it as “bedraggled and rusty” so he suggested they do something fun with it and after some thought, they settled on a pig. Making it he says was, “easy-peasy.” 

He prepped the rusted surface of the mailbox with a wire brush and then sprayed it pink with a can of Rustoleum from Ace Hardware. They used the cap of the paint can for the pig’s nose. Kelsey drew up the little ears and her father cut them out of wood using a jigsaw and affixed them using small screws. His wife had the idea for the spiral tail and she made it out of wire from a coat hanger. Kevin can’t remember if the inspiration for the wings was a nod to him being a pilot, the phrase, “when pigs fly” or both. He made the wings from scrap wood and silver spray paint lying around his shop, Kelsey drew in the feathers and “that” he said, “was that!”

Denise Stoughton is currently writing a gift book highlighting the curiously creative mailboxes of Bainbridge Island and the stories behind them. Traversing the island in her white VW Beetle in search of the island’s most interesting mailboxes, she’s become known as “The Mailbox Lady” and has even been mistaken for a mail thief. Arbiter of all things postal, when she learned of the famous Kindred Spirit Mailbox of Bird Island, NC she enlisted the help of the Bainbridge Island Park and Recreation District to install a Kindred Spirit Mailbox in upper Fort Ward Park. Stoughton says her quirky mailbox obsession has brought her closer to the community and is “crazy fun”. Follow her journey on Instagram and Facebook and to purchase mailbox related gift items visit https://www.uniquelybainbridge.com/shop.