You might think my home too small to contain even a single one of your products, but I assure you I have taken pains to clear a space within which the full excellence of your items will be easily apprehended by all who look on them, though I rarely entertain guests and it will most likely be myself only who feasts his eyes. But a man must have his private pleasures, mustn’t he?

I said to myself, You cannot bring these into your home without first preparing for them a good place, a nice place. You would not bring home a new baby before you’d made for it a little bed laid with soft blankets and something special for it to look at, something you’ve hung from the ceiling to catch the light of the sun, because you know babies need this type of enchantment. And so I have worked hard and made many sacrifices, but now the day has finally come.

My problem, Sirs—and the reason I write to you this morning—is that I cannot find my country. Where my country should rightfully reside—alphabetically speaking—I find only the country before it and the country after. I see the names of many other countries, some great—the very best ones. Yours, for example, good Sirs. But there are lesser countries, too—many, even, that are very bad. I hope you will not think me too bold when I say that my country—small though it may be—is far superior to many of these. And yet, they are there and we are not.

Is it because of our smallness we cannot be found? Are we so small you have forgotten us?

If you have forgotten us—an oversight I comprehend easily as a servant in a clerical capacity, tasked daily with many a trivial detail and forever failing to remember some item of little import to myself yet significant, even gravely so, to another party—I say, if indeed you have forgotten us, I here humbly submit my request.

At your earliest convenience, and barring any comprehensible reason as to why you would not, might you attend to—nay, rectify—the situation as outlined above, in which I, together with my countrymen—a good and clean people we—have been made to wait, so many of us, until you deem it appropriate?

COLONIAL REVIVAL

He came back from the war with a little bit of money and the helmet of a man he killed with a knife in the charred husk of a house. With the money he opened a small shop crafting fine reproductions of antique furniture. He was a competent craftsman but a better overseer—his business grew quickly once he replaced himself with several young woodworkers.

He was fond of horses. He wore his shiny riding boots while striding the aisles of his factory—for it quickly became a small factory—and when he found a wife, he bought her a big gray mare as a wedding gift. She didn’t care for horses—their smell or expense or the sounds they made. She preferred cats and collected as many as six or seven at a time—rare breeds with long hair, malformed faces, and bad temperaments. She traveled to nearby cities and towns in her big black sedan to display them, sometimes returning with purple or yellow or green satin ribbons, which she hung on the walls of the guest cottage where the cats lived.