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291 Nobody Home The lawn is putting-green smooth, the privets tonsured neatly in a row like postulants, the driveway rimmed with nightlights and roses. Owned in absentia as a fourth address, the house is loudly empty. Twice weekly, a team of maids vacuums and dusts. Otherwise, the house is so much property— real estate. The hand-cut wall-stones impress me. So do the shingles from Sicily, the guaranteed “unrustable fenestration,” the doors and shutters of African mahogany. Regardless, it all adds up to dark and silent dining rooms on silent evenings, mornings when no one wakes to birdsong, and nights as similarly dark and still and mute as midnights of the deaf and blind. Give me the clash of laughter over bacon breakfasts, coffee and love-talk, lightbulbs demanding to be changed, and curtains breathing by an open window. 292 Do I exaggerate? Perhaps. But passing a locked villa where nothing matters more than optimal upkeep for no one at all offends me. ...

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