Dear Inn Nestled Quietly on the Childhood Home of Our Nation’s First President,

No, I’m not writing to ask for the twentieth time in 14 years that my $1000 deposit be returned. As your facility manager is well aware, I gave up that crusade in late 2006 with one final plea that ended in a swirl of liquor and profanity.

According to my therapist, I just need some final closure. Hanging on to this resentment isn’t fair to me, it’s not fair to my current husband (who NEVER would have agreed to get married in a place that served colonial corn fritters by women impersonating Betsy Ross) and it’s certainly not fair to David Morse, who very adeptly played George Washington in that John Adams mini-series on HBO that I couldn’t seem to enjoy because I kept feeling (perhaps irrationally) like David owed me a large check.

One thing I must admit is that through years of intensive counseling, I’ve realized I was literally quite mad when I booked you back in 1994. Don’t get me wrong, you’re quaint in a Civil War reenactment kind of way, but the only reason I chose you is because the ray of sunshine who was to be my mother-in-law was a Virginia belle who is still hoping the south will secede from the Union and is oddly pre-occupied with from what side of the Mason-Dixon line a person originates. I’m from New York, you see, and we stopped fighting the Civil War back, oh I don’t know, somewhere around the time it ended.

Of course trying to win her over by embracing a wedding theme where the staff donned clogs, petticoats, and white ringlet wigs seems strange to me now. But I am currently well, or so the hospital implied by releasing me, and I recognize that even my convincing Robert E. Lee to rise from the dead to perform those nuptials wouldn’t have been enough to win over that slave-labor-advocating wench.

Regardless, my point here, per recommendation from my closest advisers, is to grant forgiveness (to you, not that cold-hearted bitch who is probably sewing a Confederate flag as we speak). But before I’d like to make a few points that I failed to convey in my earlier correspondence.

At the tasting you served what was billed as “authentic” colonial era dishes that all incorporated the word “colonial,” just in case the random cannons and intrusive busts of our forefathers didn’t tip us off as to the theme of the restaurant. Colonial peanut and chestnut soup. Colonial custard. Colonial herb-crusted beef medallions with hollandaise sauce.

What a sham! I don’t think hollandaise sauce had even been invented back then and if so, I bet it exacerbated George Washington’s well-documented acid reflux problem. Also, everyone knows he had wooden teeth made out of that cherry tree he chopped down and beef medallions would have been hard to chew.

Also, I know for a fact (did you think I wouldn’t do a drive-by?) another couple happily munched on Martha Washington’s colonial glazed duckling recipe that evening while their guests guzzled Ben Franklin’s Famous Electrified Punch so your establishment did not lose even one dime by my cancellation. Yes, I know it said in the contract that the deposit was non-refundable even if the venue is re-booked but when one is giddy and in love and trying desperately to tie the knot before one turns into a desperate cougar, one sometimes forgets to read the fine print in one’s rental agreement.

Finally, please alert your manager that I DID TOO find someone else to marry me thank you very much and will in fact not “die alone as green Jell-O dribbles down my chin at a nursing home where nobody will visit me.”

Oh, and I forgive you.

— Linda Marsicano