When Jonathan and Elise Brandt left Manhattan’s Upper West Side for the rolling hills of Maple Hollow, North Carolina, they thought they were buying tranquility: wrap-around porches, wicker chairs, and long, lazy evenings with nothing but cicadas for company. What they hadn’t budgeted for, they soon discovered, was a neighborhood forest of flagpoles.
Every morning, Elise counted them as she poured her coffee — seventeen in clear view, red-white-and-blue rectangles waving in unison over the cul-de-sac like an army of cheerful napkins.
To Jonathan, who had spent forty years navigating the gray canyons of Broadway and Amsterdam Avenue, the sight felt theatrical to the point of parody. “It’s like living inside a car commercial,” he muttered one morning.
At first, they simply drew the curtains. But after months of barbecue smoke and patriotic bunting, Elise’s resolve hardened. “It’s visual noise,” she told the town clerk during her first visit to Town Hall. “Flags are lovely on holidays — Memorial Day, the Fourth, Veterans Day — but not every Tuesday because the lawn looks empty.”
Maple Hollow’s government, a five-member board that met every second Wednesday in a converted hardware store, listened with polite bewilderment as the Brandts introduced Petition #47-23: A Proposed Ordinance to Regulate Non-Official Flag Display.
The measure would restrict residential American flag displays to twelve official U.S. holidays, with exemptions for schools, post offices, and government buildings.
Elise presented color-coded charts showing how continuous flag exposure “dilutes symbolic potency.” Jonathan cited a study he said he’d read “somewhere in The Atlantic.” When he concluded with the line “Patriotism should be savored, not slathered,” half the room thought it was a joke.
It wasn’t.
Neighbors filled the next meeting. The Petersons brought in their folded flag from their son’s Marine service. A retired teacher rose to say she liked waking up to “a reminder we still belong to something bigger.” Someone else whispered “Yankees” loud enough to echo.
By the third meeting, the town had become a stage. Editorials ran in the Maple Hollow Ledger under headlines like “Flatlanders vs. Flag Landers” and “Who Owns the Stars and Stripes?”. Local hardware stores reported record sales in flagpoles, perhaps out of solidarity or spite. Even the mayor — a soft-spoken accountant — found himself giving interviews to Raleigh stations about “the new culture war in miniature.”
For their part, the Brandts held firm. They insisted they weren’t unpatriotic, merely “aesthetically overexposed.” In interviews they emphasized their love of country but also their love of symmetry, peace, and “less visual clutter.”
When the vote finally came, the motion failed 5–0. The chairman thanked the couple for their civic involvement and suggested, kindly, that they might “consider taller hedges.”
That evening, as the sun went down and the streetlamps blinked on, the air filled again with soft flapping sounds — banners catching the warm Carolina breeze. Jonathan sighed and poured two glasses of white wine.
“Back home,” he said, “you couldn’t even find a flag unless it was September 11th.”
Elise sipped, eyes on the porch railing where a neighbor’s banner fluttered like a heartbeat.
“Back home,” she said, “no one seemed to care either.”
The crickets kept on, steady as a metronome, beneath a street lined with stars and stripes that weren’t going anywhere soon.