Thoughts, no. 135
In the 1940s and 1950s Frances Glessner Lee, a Chicago heiress then in her sixties, built dollhouse rooms where someone had died, at one inch to the foot, every detail made by hand. She made them to train homicide detectives, who in those days were apt to trample a scene before they had looked at it, and they are still used for that in Baltimore. The answers to the cases have always been kept secret. So nobody studying them gets to be right; they only get to be careful, the window, the stain, which way the chair fell. I like a lesson built that way round. Most of us would rather be right than careful, and she made a room where careful was all there was.
Written at the house on .