This is a picture of a part of my life that has never gone particularly well. It's a houseplant:

This particular houseplant is, allegedly, a plumeria. Plumerias are a beautiful plant that grow like mold in Hawaii and on my mother-in-law's porch in San Antonio, Texas. They grow in Texas because my mother-in-law has done a fabulous job of bringing them back from her trips to Hawaii and transplanting them. She has at least six of them, and they have grown into trees that bloom luscious, sweet-smelling flowers all summer long.

Well, I have a plumeria too, because when Dan and I were dating, his family took a vacation to Hawaii, and his mom sent me a cutting for a plumeria, which I planted in a pot, where, for about a year, it looked like a stick in a pot. In fact, when I dropped this plant off at the home of my friends Gwyn and Mondo to be plant-sat in Clovis, New Mexico while I went home to get married to Dan, Gwyn made the mistake of trying to ask about the plant, which always goes the same way: "What should I do with the, ummm ... I'm sorry, what is it exactly that you're growing here?"

Once we moved into our apartment in Albuquerque, the plant did slightly better, putting out a few leaves due to the sun on the porch. But once the weather turned cold, it had to be moved inside, and its leaves yellowed and died and it looked, once again, like some horticultural radiation victim. People would come over for dinner and see it sitting there in the dining room and try not to ask about it, but eventually they would say "So, what kind of a plant is that .... It is a plant, isn't it?"

There have been many times I have been convinced that the plumeria was dead, and I've considered just admitting defeat, throwing it away, and acting like I don't remember my foray into tropical gardening. But instead, I water it and fertilize it, and these days, it has a nice crop of green leaves that I'm proud of, even though I know, in my heart, after five years, that it is never, ever going to make any flowers no matter what I do. Still, my mother-in-law hasn't lost faith in my ability to grow this plant, in spite of my repeated demonstrations of ineptness. Last time we were in San Antonio, she gave me a cutting off of one of her own trees so that I could start another plant. Apparently, she's now working on the theory that the plant itself is biologically challenged, and that's very gracious of her, since what's closer to the truth is probably that I am just a hopeless gardener. I've decided to embrace her optimism, and so as you can see if you look behind the big plant in the photo, I've stuck the new little plant in a pot of its own and am dutifully tending to it in hopes that it will flourish. It's a baseless hope, but one I'm fond of these days nonetheless. It's good to have hope.

Who knows? Maybe it will work out. After all, I may not have had much luck growing fabulous, sweet-smelling tropical flowers, but I am the undisputed queen of growing weeds. We really are going to pull those up this weekend. And by "we" I mean "Dan."