Nearly Perfectand Almost Painless

摘要

On day 706 of living in a tall, glassy, and somewhat green house notched into a steep hill near Half Moon Bay, California, my husband and I were pondering what to plant in our two-story atrium. Steve, a writer, was musing about how cool it would be to domesticate a giant sequoia, to tame it into a wee but still grand tree. "What, no papaya?" I asked. Sometime early in the five-year slog between our lot purchase and final inspection, a thought had crossed Steve's mind: If our entry space can collect enough solar heat to sustain the resident fauna-us, two big-footed teenagers, several cats, and a dog-then why not tropical flora? The fresh-fruit fantasy soothed him when the architect failed for weeks to return e-mails or phone calls (excuse: His poodle died). It worked to mellow the harsh bid for a fire-sprinkler system from Seize Fire Incorporated (excuse: Sprinkler Fitters Union Local 483). It even got him through the tagging incident, in which our contractor scrawled, in hot-pink spray paint on a public road, a testy directive to a neighbor who had complained about encroaching construction debris (excuse: He started it).