On a recent evening a man came up to me at the front desk of my library. He was carrying a large plank of plywood.

On the plywood were copious amounts of what appeared to be a flour and water mix. He might have put yeast in it to make it airier and lighter. He had shaped the mixture into a kind of giant map. There was something I took to be divisions for states, or provinces. He'd created a facsimile of a capitol building out of flour mix, and he made hundreds of tiny people as well. There were cities and mountains and rivers, all of it roughly discernible in its pasty white mush.

"I'd like the library to have this." The man said, setting his weighty plank onto my counter.

"I can't take this." I replied. "I don't even know what it is."

He looked at me like I was a fool. "It's a dough nation."