What about the plants? The bougainvillea, the aloe, and the orange tree, which—sincere efforts notwithstanding—never yielded any fruit. They were all in pots—cerulean, puce—because we no longer had a yard, having scaled down from the house with three bedrooms and a lawn whose hollows we could not manage to fill. Not with laughter, or with tears except my own, and not for a lack of trying. It was a house which—as my mother-in-law liked to proclaim—simply longed to be a home, and we failed to deliver. Where some couples watched their children grow, we—you know, that couple—came to content ourselves with watching oranges ripen on a fucking patio. Some parents dreamed of futures for the fruit of their loins, and we—the non-parents—dreamed of slicing and devouring the fruit of our labor.