MISQUAH — The town now has a subcommittee to study the corner of Birch and Second, and the subcommittee, as of Monday, has three members and one conspicuously empty fourth chair. The Mayor would like to fill it, for balance. We would like, respectfully and with the authority of having watched this corner for the better part of a century, to leave it empty.

Three is a fine number for a body that must actually decide something. Three cannot tie. Three can meet in a booth at the Daybreak without anyone having to pull up a chair or move the sugar. Three is, not for nothing, the precise number of stop signs the corner has gotten along with, peaceably and without incident, since 1957. There is a certain wisdom in matching the size of the committee to the size of the problem, and the problem here is one sign.

A fourth member introduces the standing possibility of a 2–2 deadlock, and a deadlock on a subcommittee is exactly how a question that should take a single evening comes instead to take a whole season, and then a year, and then its place in the long municipal twilight where this very question has already spent sixty-nine of them. We have seen it before. We have, in this matter specifically, seen it before, more times than the clerk can reliably count.

For the record, the corner has been studied before. A petition circulated in 1957 (denied), and again in 1964 (lost, physically — the clerk of that era kept a loose desk), and the question came within one vote of resolution in 1988 before a blizzard postponed the meeting and, apparently, the resolve. Donna Skoglund’s minutes on the matter now run, by her own count, to “a drawer and a half — call it a filing cabinet by October.” We mention this history not to mock it but to submit it as evidence: three neighbors and an evening. It has never needed more.

We yield to no one in our respect for balance. But balance, on a question like this one, is simply what you get when three sensible neighbors stand at a corner, agree among themselves that it works, and go home in time for the ballgame. We urge the Mayor to let three be three, and the corner be the corner, and the fourth chair stay open — for company, if anyone cares to come and watch, which around here, on a slow enough evening, someone always does.