If you could possibly transfer anyplace, the place wouldn’t it be? This was once a query I’d ask myself or others at dinner events, however two years in the past, as new mother and father going through the unsustainable prices of Bay Space life and the looming risk of middle-age atrophy, my husband, Ben, and I took to the web in earnest with the notion of reinventing our lives someplace new.
We have been, in fact, a part of a widespread development: searching for journey and greener pastures elsewhere within the period of globalisation. Even so, the notion felt thrilling. The place would we go? Our search had some parameters: affordability, a pure panorama (I dreamed of cicadas, cypress timber), a spot with a language we both already spoke or might be taught simply sufficient in order that we might contribute to the group. We’d spent our careers working in colleges and nonprofits with younger immigrants, and, nonetheless completely different it’d look in a brand new nation, we had no intention of leaving a lifetime of service behind. Above all, although, what we needed was an setting wherein we might spend quite a lot of time writing and afford to do it. However Ben had one other non-negotiable of his personal: proximity to browsing. This irritated me, because it considerably restricted our search, however I supposed it was affordable sufficient to design a dream life based on one’s precise goals.
“There’s browsing in Sardinia,” he mentioned.
We’d heard concerning the “€1 home” programme wherein poor, depopulating cities put their deserted or unused buildings up on the market. The programme, I quickly discovered, was truly a free assortment of schemes that economically struggling cities used to lure outdoors funding and new residents. The campaigns appeared to me to have been largely profitable – some cities had offered all their listed properties. I pored over dozens of stories articles that had served as €1 home promotion through the years. By attracting worldwide consumers to a home that “prices lower than a cup of espresso”, as one piece put it, a few of Italy’s most distant cities now had new life circulating via them. Many native officers had come to see €1 home experiments as their potential salvation.
What was the catch? It appeared most municipalities required you to renovate the home inside a few years of its buy, and because of excessive ranges of curiosity, the homes typically went to public sale, finally promoting for way more than a single euro. However what we puzzled about have been the moral issues – the traditional tensions of gentrification. What wouldn’t it imply simply to purchase our manner right into a international place the place we had no connections and attempt to arrange a house there?
Nonetheless, we stored trying. There’s a city in northern Sardinia referred to as Sedini that was, based on Liliana Forina, a girl I received in contact with on-line, about to launch a €1 home initiative of its personal. A trendy girl in her 60s from Milan, she had lately moved to Sedini from the mainland. The city wasn’t removed from the seashore and, judging by the images and Forina’s descriptions, appeared lovely.
I organized a gathering together with her over Zoom. She appeared on-screen from her workplace, a Sardinian valley stretching behind her. A number of years in the past, she defined, she and her new husband started scouring Italy for the right place to dwell. Every weekend, they might go to a brand new area, feeling out the vibe in distant villages and golden-lit coastal cities speckled with seashores, in every place attempting to think about a life. It was comparatively simple to cross choices off their listing: this city was too costly; this one too was filled with vacationers; this one lacked timber. They needed quick access to fundamental companies corresponding to a hospital, a pharmacy, a police station. Additionally they needed a view. However above all, they have been searching for what Forina referred to as their dolce vita, their candy life. Ultimately, they discovered it in Sedini, this breezy, hilltop city in northern Sardinia the place the bells of a number of church buildings rang at midday, and, from a distance, the white-stone homes appeared stacked like vintage toys on a rickety shelf. A neighborhood property agent had discovered them a three-storey home proper within the historic city centre with a view of the nice inexperienced valley under. The home was livable however somewhat run-down and to not Forina’s style, so the couple set to work renovating it, including an upstairs terrace, exposing outdated beams, bringing vintage tiles to a brand new gleam and flattening partitions to permit in additional mild.
Their dream life was certainly changing into a actuality. Principally. As lovely as their house was, Forina famous early on that lots of the different homes in Sedini have been in a state of full dilapidation. This left the in any other case picturesque old-world city with a ghostly high quality. The city was beautiful, but it surely wanted extra folks – ideally folks from outdoors Sardinia. She dreamed of extra cosmopolitan neighbours, folks extra like her. Would possibly I be one in all them?
Depopulation is a main battle for a lot of locations all through Italy’s inside. Younger folks, particularly, are leaving cities corresponding to Sedini, shifting elsewhere for instructional alternatives or for work. These historic settlements are plagued by buildings that now sit empty.
Forina started researching the €1 home scheme and introduced the concept to Sedini’s city authorities. The mayor and his workers – all longtime residents whose households had lived there for generations – have been simply satisfied. That summer time, they have been going to introduce the concept to the remainder of the locals.
“Come go to us in Sedini!” she informed me on our name. “Keep in my house. You’ll find it irresistible right here.”
If you happen to might transfer anyplace, the place wouldn’t it be? It’s a query that gestures towards a life in some stage of calcification – the might implying constraint, limitations, the presumption that one merely can not, in reality, up and transfer. The €1 home programme serves because the doorway for simply this type of craving for one thing new. Hate your job? Wish to transfer however can’t afford a home? Nervous about the place you’ll retire, or the way you’ll even handle to retire in any respect? You probably have the fitting passport and sufficient cash, you’ll find some place else to dwell. Why not make that place Italy?
Final summer time, I made a decision to take Forina up on her provide to go to Sedini and, whereas I used to be at it, a bunch of different depopulating cities all through Italy, too. My husband and I stuffed an inordinate quantity of belongings right into a preposterous variety of luggage and flew with our 11-month-old to Italy for an journey in pursuit of the opportunity of a brand-new life.
‘Everyone desires a chunk of historical past,” Giacomo Verrua, an Italian property developer, informed me. “And in Italy, historical past is in all places.” Inside this cliche, an individual can obtain a life’s function and a way of belonging via possession. However Italy’s low-cost actual property is just out there to foreigners as a result of, opposite to common mythology, Italian life isn’t pure romance and ease.
The nation is house to roughly 60 million folks, however that determine is predicted to say no by 2 million by 2040 and by at the least 4 million by 2050 – one of many steepest depopulation charges in all of Europe. This is because of an ageing inhabitants, however additionally it is a results of lack of alternative that sees poor and rich Italians alike shifting searching for higher alternatives. In 2023, 9.8% of Italians lived under the poverty line, up from 6.9% in 2014. In Sardinia, roughly 20% of individuals dwell in poverty. The nation’s birthrate has hit all-time lows, and almost 30% of its properties are unoccupied. Small Italian cities are experimenting with all kinds of monetary incentives – tax breaks, even money handouts – to carry Italians again to the countryside. In 2022, Sardinia provided a €15,000 bonus, with some strings connected, for shifting to the island.
Different locations are experimenting with related incentives. Tulsa, Oklahoma, provides a $10,000 relocation grant to distant staff as nicely a membership at a downtown coworking area. Throughout Japan, deserted properties promote for zero {dollars}. There are particular visas for UK and different non-EU residents searching for to relocate to Spain; all they should present is a sure amount of cash of their checking account to qualify. Greece provides a “golden visa” to anybody who can make investments at the least €250,000 in a Greek property.
However no such initiative has fairly captured the general public creativeness because the €1 home scheme. “It’s a PR marketing campaign,” mentioned Maurizio Berti, who runs 1eurohouses.com, a web site devoted to monitoring and selling varied €1 home cities. And it’s a wildly profitable one at that.
The €1 home challenge appears to have been the brainchild of Vittorio Sgarbi, the Italian artwork critic and TV persona turned mayor of the small, quickly depopulating city of Salemi, Sicily. On being elected in 2008, he started questioning whether or not he might draw funding into Salemi by providing up its empty, falling-toward-ruin buildings to foreigners for a token price. Outsiders scrambled to grab up the dirt-cheap properties, demand for native development boomed and Salemi’s emptied homes have been as soon as once more crammed.
Seeing this success, different Italian municipalities started devising their very own €1 home plans. In keeping with 1eurohouses.com, there at the moment are 73 cities which have launched or are within the means of adopting a model of the mannequin. Every city organises the operation barely otherwise: some oversee the property gross sales instantly, whereas others merely join consumers to sellers and hype the occasion to the press. However the secret is that the city can place situations on the gross sales. Typically, consumers are required to repair the homes up inside a sure period of time (and can typically must depend on native architects and artisans). Some cities additionally require consumers to keep up full-time residence, or to open a enterprise.
Advocates of the scheme insist that everybody stands to win: the city advantages economically with an elevated tax base, extra folks to patronise native companies and an area constructing growth, whereas consumers acquire the house – and the life – of their goals. However its detractors fear that these flash gross sales threat turning these endangered Italian cities into mere curiosities, packing them with foreigners in order that the tradition all however disappears.
The philosophical conundrum of those ageing, depopulating cities is that this: open a spot as much as newcomers and threat eroding its important nature, or permit it to wither away and die?
Seen a method, the story of each place on Earth is that of migration and alter. Between 1880 and 1924, somemore than 4 million Italians migrated to america. In the meantime, prior to now decade, about 900,000 refugees have discovered their technique to Italy – from Syria, Afghanistan, Mali, Eritrea, Guinea, Pakistan and dozens of different nations. The Italian authorities is working laborious to seal up its borders to maintain these migrants out, whereas municipalities invite the €1 home gawkers. The €1 home scheme represents a brand new period of migration. A product of late capitalism, it seeks to fill the gaps left in a single place with keen, resourced travellers from one other – these with some cash within the financial institution, steady passports and thus with different choices. Individuals, in different phrases, like me.
On the primary leg of our journey, we’d organized to hitch Ben’s dad, stepmother and quite a few members of his prolonged Italian American household in Tuscany. They’d rented a powerful thirteenth century, two-storey stone villa that ignored fields of sorghum and sunflowers. This place was, it occurred to me, tailored for the wistful outsider, possessing sufficient of the quintessential Italian iconography (draping vines, sweeping views from shuttered home windows, stone flooring) and the brand new: an open ground plan, air-con and palatial personal loos off most bedrooms.
The villa was managed by Yulia, a Ukrainian émigré in her 30s. One afternoon, she came to visit to assist us with the air-con and introduced her one-year-old, who joined my child in crawling across the living-room ground.
“How a lot does childcare price in California?” she requested. “$2,300 {dollars} a month,” I informed her, stunning myself as I mentioned the phrases. Yulia gasped. She had a daughter a number of months older than ours and had been lamenting the Italian price ticket of round €300 a month. Contemplating that our childcare price greater than we spent on housing, it was all too apparent to marvel but once more – what the fuck have been we doing with our lives? Home costs have soared in current a long time and rents proceed to rise, and all of the whereas an increasing number of folks have jobs that permit them to work from anyplace with an web connection.
“If you happen to discover the fitting place, we’d go in on it with you,” Ben’s uncle Aldo mentioned. Our rental villa was simply an hour and a half from the Tuscan city of Montieri, a hilltop settlement relationship again to pre-Roman occasions that had been one of many first to undertake a €1 home mannequin again in 2016. I left the household in the future to go to the city, winding via fields of sunflowers and climbing a number of thousand toes in elevation via cooling stands of forest. Montieri’s younger mayor, Nicola Verruzzi, took me on a strolling tour of the city, with its streets and slim stone passages, which have been virtually solely empty of individuals. “The warmth,” he mentioned with a shrug.
Montieri had been a mining city since its founding across the yr 1000 – silver and copper, then pyrite and lead. However when the final mine closed within the Nineties, the city was flung right into a cycle of depopulation and abandonment. Within the Sixties, Verruzzi mentioned, roughly 4,000 folks lived right here. Within the twenty years after the mines closed, Montieri misplaced 3,000. Homes in the principle squares have been empty and falling to spoil, and companies have been on the point of closure.
In 2014, Verruzzi introduced his plan to promote its deserted homes for €1. It was only a whim, he informed me. Not like Sardinia and plenty of of Italy’s poorer areas, Tuscany already loomed giant within the international creativeness. The municipality’s inboxes have been shortly full of consumers from all all over the world.
In some methods, Montieri was the best candidate for the €1 home experiment. The city had already been laborious at work updating its power and heating infrastructure and laying fibre web cable. And Tuscany is already a vacationer vacation spot, notably for cyclists, mountain bikers and hikers.
Nonetheless, the success of its €1 home scheme was exceptional. Verruzzi estimates that 30 new companies have opened on this small city because of the initiative. On our tour, I used to be fascinated to see simply what number of buildings within the dead-centre of city had been renovated by foreigners prior to now few years. “This home was an outdated jail,” he informed me, pointing to a slim two-storey that had offered for €80,000, its unique stone lined in locations by new stucco punctured by giant, trendy home windows.
For the reason that launch, some 70 homes have offered. A lot of them are used as trip properties, however they have been now not empty and falling into spoil. New electrician companies have opened to service the renovators, there are new eating places and bars, and tourism income is up.
Admittedly, a lot of the proof for the success of the €1 home programme extra broadly stays anecdotal, and most of it comes from city leaders themselves. However what little knowledge does exist suggests the initiatives’ exceptional financial promise. Since saying a €1 home marketing campaign in 2017, the ten,000-strong city of Mussomeli, Sicily, as an example, has seen greater than 125 homes offered. The mayor’s workplace calculated that this introduced €7m to the native economic system, together with builders, tradespeople, eating places and resorts. The financial growth wasn’t only a results of the home gross sales: it estimated that roughly 6,000 folks visited Mussomeli simply to take a look at homes in 2018 and 2019, bringing revenue to native eating places and resorts.
In Montieri, Verruzzi put me in contact with Paolo, a Tuscan architect who married a Canadian girl; the 2 of them now comprise the in-demand design staff of Montieri’s new, international class.
Although enchanted by the notional historical past of the place they’re shopping for, many consumers have a poor historic sense of simply what it’s they’ve purchased, Paolo mentioned. He and his spouse informed me, with a smile and a slight eye-roll, that American guests “are all the time searching for frescoes”.
The trickiest half concerning the €1 home scheme for consumers, Paolo defined, is that it’s a gamble: inspections on outdated properties corresponding to this could solely glean a lot data, making it laborious to know what, in reality, you’re shopping for and the way a lot work it’ll want. That’s additionally a part of the enjoyable. He recalled that one home in Montieri took years to promote as a result of a menacing crack ran down a central wall. Maybe the entire constructing would wish retrofitting – or to be constructed anew. When it lastly offered, the consumers employed Paolo, whose staff fastidiously eliminated the plaster on the broken wall solely to search out an exquisite stone chimney behind it. This was what had precipitated the plaster to buckle. What had appeared like a legal responsibility was in reality a surprising relic of the outdated home.
We spent the week sprawled like lizards in Tuscany, having fun with the quiet and the pure mild and availing ourselves of the free native childcare (the grandparents). Then early one morning, Ben, the child and I received within the automobile and drove to the ferry, which delivered us to the jap aspect of Sardinia, the place we went searching for a seashore with surfable waves. We headed westward, crossing via the mountains and the city of Montresta, which has additionally jumped on the €1 home bandwagon. It was settled within the 18th century by Greeks fleeing the Ottoman empire. Now, the place and its folks have been weighing whether or not to usher within the subsequent wave of individuals from distant.
It was scorching and empty, like Montieri had been, and all its companies have been closed. We didn’t see a soul. It was laborious to image dwelling there for sensible causes. We’d spent over per week straight having fun with the assistance of grandparents in taking care of our child. If we moved right here – even when surrounded by folks – we’d be, at first anyway, all on our personal. Was that the life we needed? An individual should buy a home, in different phrases, however house is one thing that appears to require greater than cash: the foreign money of relationships and time.
The subsequent day, I used to be due in Sedini, the place I’d meet Forina and attend the launch occasion for the city’s €1 home initiative. I arrived simply because the night’s setup was starting.
“We’re a city of outdated folks,” Sebastiano Finá, one in all Sedini’s city councillors, informed me with a shrug as he dragged chairs into a big assembly room within the centre of city. A lean, good-looking man in his 60s, Finá was sporting shorts and a tan and had simply stubbed out a cigarette within the entryway. In just some quick hours, the corridor could be filled with townspeople for the formal announcement of the brand new housing plan that Forina had helped to draft, hoping to persuade the house owners of Sedini’s outdated, deserted homes. Some had moved away. Others lived close by and easily couldn’t afford – or didn’t need to trouble with – the maintenance. And a number of the properties have been shared by so many descendants of the unique house owners that they hadn’t figured methods to cut up the prices of the renovations or make a cogent resolution concerning the constructing’s future. Underneath the brand new proposal, the city authorities would create the required tax buildings and provide tax incentives to each consumers and sellers, along with channelling events on to the Sedini residents promoting their outdated tumbledowns. This was half of a bigger initiative referred to as “Sedini per la rinascita” (Sedini for Rebirth).
Whereas Finá completed unstacking chairs, Forina stood on the entrance of the room, clad in an elegant purple pantsuit and twiddling with a projector. “How do I make this join?” she groaned with frustration. “A city of outdated folks!” Finá repeated, pointing to Forina with fun. “This is the reason we’d like this programme!”
We nonetheless had a while earlier than the occasion started, so Forina provided to indicate me round city. Southern Europe was within the midst of a heatwave. It was about 38C (100F) in Sedini, the air so thick that it was disagreeable to breathe. The asphalt and centuries-old stone emitted a warmth haze that made all the things seem warped, as if considered via smudged glass.
It wasn’t exactly the paradise I had pictured for myself, as a result of, I realised as soon as I’d arrived in Sedini, I wasn’t truly all that fascinated about dwelling within the centre of a city however extra within the distant ramble of the countryside – which wasn’t what the €1 home programme was typically promoting. However, inclined to the decision of low-cost actual property and the craving for a full reinvention of self and life, I had at that very second been questioning what precisely it was promoting.
By six, we have been again on the assembly corridor the place folks have been taking their seats. Some 40-odd folks had turned out – not a foul exhibiting given the warmth. A lot to my discomfort, I used to be seated on the entrance going through the gang, together with Forina; Salvatore Carta, the gravel-voiced mayor; and Angela Fresi, the city’s buoyant deputy mayor, wearing a fitted pantsuit of vibrant inexperienced.
“Welcome,” Carta bid the gang in Italian. To not fear, he assured the viewers: the “€1 euro” value was simply a place to begin. Sellers might listing for a lot as they needed. “The municipality is just the facilitator of the sale,” he mentioned. It might be the job of the mayor’s workplace to draw consumers.
When it was Forina’s flip to talk, she implored the gang and the house owners of an deserted or uninhabited home to “perceive the significance of handing it over to those that can and need to renovate and dwell in it. In any other case, there can be double harm: the proprietor will find yourself with a pile of damaged bricks of no worth and the degradation of the village can be progressive and irreversible.”
A Dutch couple who have been renovating their lately purchased Sedini house took the stage. The husband, a white-haired gentleman with a slight swagger, spoke at size in respectable Italian about his fondness for the city. His spouse, a trim girl with quick auburn hair, apologised for her lack of Italian.
“Thanks for the nice and cozy welcome to your nation and to your city,” she mentioned. “I discover this place very genuine. I really feel the longer term right here.” After a pause, she added, “And I see the longer term right here for us.”
‘A nation,” writes Paolo Pileri, an Italian professor of city design and an outspoken critic of the €1 home mannequin, “is a fancy artefact of structure, streets, alleys and homes, mixed with an internet of relationships, experiences and interrelated social practices, and it due to this fact can’t be diminished to a mere confused sum of homes.”
And but homes are what are on the market. The concern is that, as with all types of gentrification, a sudden inflow of moneyed outsiders will change the tradition of a spot – erode its customs, flip its values on their head, change its elementary essence.
Fresi, Sedini’s deputy mayor, had spoken to me at size concerning the meals competition the city held every autumn, wherein households opened up their wine cellars, and farmers their barns and dwelling rooms, so that folks might share their harvests with each other. This was some extent of satisfaction for the locals and a matter of group connection. It additionally was a lure for consumers. Such occasions wouldn’t vanish with the mere presence of outsiders, however the detractors of the €1 home scheme appeared to worry that such occasions would turn out to be much less of a real cultural custom and extra of a present – these cities changing into Disneyfied villages to be fetishised, even by their inhabitants.
Marco Pizzi, a sociologist who has carried out intensive analysis into the impacts of the €1 home campaigns in Umbria, informed me that although he was sceptical when he started his analysis, he’s come to see the programme as an revolutionary native method to financial redevelopment. The international funding might, in reality, be what permits a few of these cities to outlive – and the actual fact of their survival would permit their traditions to proceed. Nearly everybody I spoke with in Italy with first-hand expertise of €1 home initiatives agreed: these schemes have been a type of revival and had drawn folks from overseas who have been curious to study and take part in native methods of life.
I spoke to Jennifer Fortune, a veterinarian from the Florida panhandle who began researching Italian actual property throughout a 2022 household trip. She’d heard of the €1 home scheme, however quickly discovered that there have been plenty of low-cost homes on the market throughout Italy that lacked a number of the €1 home competitors and purple tape. On the real-estate website idealista.it, she discovered a good-looking three-storey home not removed from the place she was staying in northern Italy. After failing to achieve the real-estate agent, she snuck inside to have a look. The place was much more enchanting than she’d imagined. A stone home with brick ceilings and tiled flooring, overlooking the Alps and a hazelnut grove, it was, she mentioned, the stuff of goals.
The property was in tough form and would wish quite a lot of work, however she was undeterred. In truth, the work appeared like enjoyable. She employed Italian property legal professionals to assist type out the acquisition. However even with their assist, the method concerned seemingly infinite paperwork. After which got here the renovations. It might really feel like a full-time job, she informed me – not simply due to all the alternatives one has to make for such a giant challenge, however as a result of bureaucratic logjams.
It didn’t assist that she doesn’t converse Italian. “However I’m actually pleasant,” she informed me, “and I snort lots. And I’ve a bank card – that helps, too.”
Buying a property in Italy, in different phrases, just isn’t for the faint of coronary heart. This appears to be baked into the €1 home mannequin: the boundaries to a foreigner shopping for property in Italy be certain that solely probably the most dedicated consumers make it to the end line – those that actually need to make a life within the city and have the funds to do it.
Some €1 home municipalities at the moment are so full of foreigners that one wonders what – past historic curiosity – the unique city nonetheless has, or will quickly turn out to be. The Sicilian city of Sambuca di Sicilia, as CNN reviews, has been so profitable in luring €1 housers that it’s now thought-about the Sicilian “Little America”. It’s not clear whether or not Italian residents of the area thoughts.
Pileri’s argument in opposition to the €1 home mannequin makes good sense to me when levelled in opposition to moneyed outsiders, but it surely additionally verges on the form of nativism that seeks to maintain refugees and poor immigrants out of Italy. What’s an “unique” place, anyway, when each place is the product of migration upon migration, change after change? And is a city actually higher off if half emptied?
What of Sedini’s goals of rebirth? Now, almost two years later, Forina says solely a handful of Sedini residents have dedicated to promoting their properties within the historic centre of city – some for the token €1 value, and others for a beginning value of nearer to €5,000. She stays considerably on the helm. She has teamed up with Maurizio Berti and a vacationer outfit to supply a “grand tour” of the world this coming summer time in hopes of attracting worldwide consumers and, for the tour operator and Berti, of maybe making some cash alongside the best way.
I requested Fresi, the mayor, why she thought so few had but signed over their homes to promote. She wasn’t certain. She admitted there was already a “lack of belief” between the city’s longtime residents and the few newcomers who had lately moved into city. All this effort to promote their city to outsiders, and so shortly, felt suspicious to some. Sure, they needed the city to outlive. However many appreciated issues how they have been.
One of many elementary functions of the €1 home programme, based on Sedini’s official tips, “is the revitalisation of the historic a part of the city, restoring it to its historic operate of the driving power of life, tradition and exercise”. A city wants folks, Fresi and the remainder of the city leaders knew. It wants patrons of its eating places and bars and grocers; it wants folks to have a tendency its streets and take away its rubbish; it wants folks to assist make its selections, construct its homes, educate its youngsters, look after its elders and gown its folks’s wounds. It wants folks to have its youngsters and bury its useless. The query, actually, is who these folks can be.
By the point we received again house to California from our personal grand tour, we weren’t so certain any longer concerning the Sardinia plan. It was far; it was scorching; dwelling all by ourselves within the countryside with a small child is perhaps a very glorious technique to lose our minds.
However whereas en route house, I’d acquired an e mail from a pair who have been attempting to draw consumers to a small hamlet referred to as Bozzolo within the northern area of Liguria. The e-mail was excessive in its evocation of paradise, but it surely had an impact. Had we given up too shortly? Possibly there was a dream place for us in Italy and we simply hadn’t discovered it but. Or perhaps what we wanted to be completely happy was to not defect from our lives, however maintain the opportunity of defection eternally in our again pocket, taking it out and turning it over in our fingers every so often, as a result of doing so revealed that the life we already had was truly, blessedly, fairly rattling good.
I typically recall a motorbike journey we took one afternoon from our Tuscan villa, arriving, sweating and panting, on the prime of a hill the place a home, boarded up and overgrown with scrub brush, sat quietly within the sweltering warmth. One window remained open, and an outdated curtain, only a scrap of fabric, now, billowed with breeze – a suggestion of life. Now and again, convincing myself it’s only for analysis, I’ll poke round on the web to see if it’s on the market.
That is an edited model of a narrative that first appeared in VQR
