In front of the small blue house with the darker blue trim and the rickety white gate, a seed was blown by the wind and as it landed it sighed and the soil sighed because they were exactly where they were supposed to be.

And as it grew into a sprout, with little green wings on each side of its stem and as its likeness to a dragonfly became undeniable, the house changed color and a man and a woman lived in it and the house was bright now and the seedling grew faster. Then the house not only was light, it exuded light, and its walls were pleased because they had people to listen to, and its doors were content because they had soft, warm hands on their knobs, and the windows were clean and the winks were wet and the man and the woman were happy because their hair was the color of wedding dresses and their skin was the consistency of silk.

And when the seedling became something you could call a tree, the house was colored gray and the windows were boarded up and the rickety white gate was no longer rickety but simply fallen down.

And then came the children with their ugly faces and someday someone would call them beautiful, but now they put their hands on the doorknobs of the house without permission and the walls knew things about them that their mothers and fathers would never have to hear.

And the day the tree stopped growing upward and started growing out, a boy and a girl filled up the house and they had something exactly unlike the man and the woman. But their something, like the spots on the wings of the moth that lived by the single light in the master bedroom closet, could easily be mistaken for something else. So she gave him what he could never give back, and the walls closed their eyes but couldn't plug their ears, and on that day people who drove by thought the house was purple.