Pardon me, Miss, but your stalker is showing.

On nice days I take the dog out walking. We have a route through the neighborhood, about two miles, up hills and down and alongside the bird sanctuary, and past about 90% of the houses it contains. It's a small neighborhood, and the houses are oldish and packed snugly together, and it's the sort of neighborhood where people are hanging outside enjoying nice days when we're having them, which coincidentally (if you'll remember) are the days I'm walking the dog. And so I end up having a lot of extemporaneous short conversations, which is not exactly easy for me under ordinary circumstances, but the dog is an amazing icebreaker; all conversations start and center around him, because let's face it, Leory has pretty much got it goin' on. And it's gotten even easier now that his stupidly good looks are not also accompanied by a snarling, psychotic homicidal rage. (Have I mentioned that the fixing honestly seems to have additionally fixed the rages? I mean, I knew it was a possibility, obviously, but that results for adult dogs are scattershot, and I hadn't dared hope.)

So we walk, and I talk about the dog and introduce him and am introduced and am pleasantly surprised by his suddenly beautiful manners, and I have managed to meet a lot of people in the neighborhood this way, including people I knew from elsewhere whom I did not know were neighbors at all. We stand around and chat and I go on my way, and as I'm walking away, I am thinking to myself, one day I am going to figure out a way to ask to see your house without absolutely terrifying you, and man, when I do, that will be a happy day. Which is a little weird, I know. Okay, a lot weird.

The thing is, though, that I like houses. And by that I guess I mean that in addition to liking the houses themselves, the physicality of them, the architecture and the craftsmanship, the idiosyncrasy of even the newest most cookie-cutterish neighborhood, the imperfections, the little ways older houses settle into their worn grooves, in addition to those things (I bet you thought I'd lost track of my sentence here, right? Well, I have not), you can tell a lot about people by looking around the space they inhabit. And I'm not talking about going through their underwear drawers and sneaking a look at their internet caches, either. You can tell bucketloads by looking around at a perfectly ordinary living room. Even the most minimalist, clutter-free rooms tell stories of the people who live in them, a Cliff's Notes offering a guide, rendering me a little less foundering and clueless. Three cheers for the shorthand of interior design!

I just killed any chance I ever had of seeing your house, right? Fair enough: I'm not sure I'd want me exploring my life, either. But that doesn't stop me walking past my favorite pink house and thinking, I think I'd like you. I bet if I could see inside, I'd know for sure almost immediately. It doesn't stop me from kind of crushing on the people who live there, even though I have never actually seen them.

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