Short Prose Nothing's More Innocent Than Desire Luann Jacobs At forty-two I went back to school but my dog gained weight and I quit. Dogs, children, husbands, houseplants: what that means could dawn on you slowly. The first day of college, say, you see a split-leaf philodendron outside the Durham K-Mart, green and waxy soaking up the North Carolina afternoon sun. The plant looks like the large elephant-eared plants around your parents' patio in Florida. Enough said. You buy it and take it to the dorm where you don't even know what the exposure is or whether the woman you are rooming with likes plants or not.           That happened to me.           Did I ask myself, Do you want to spend your freshman year sticking your finger into that plant's dirt to see whether it needs water or not? Do you want to dust those leaves off regularly? Will you let the water set out so that the chlorine evaporates and the edges of the leaves don't turn brown? I did not.           Labs tend to obesity: obesity and ear infections. Oti-Max will clear an ear infection up: five drops, twice a day for fourteen days in the affected ear. You can read in a book from any library about the breed and make your own decision. Or you can be walking your second son to school with your third son in a pack on your back and your second son can say, Mamma, you're just not listening to me. I don't want to pet somebody else's dog on the street. I want a dog of my own to love. Enough said. You go to the humane society that weekend and drive home with a black dog in the car licking your face. I'm telling you such a thing is not impossible. It can happen easier than you would think.           I'm talking about every single thing you do, the smallest action you try to take is like that. And it's not just the action; even a thought can sink you in pretty deep. You can think, God, I love trees. Who doesn't love trees? Enough said. You join the village street tree committee. Before you know it you're standing in front of four lawyers on the village board and they are demanding to know why you didn't think ahead and what in heaven's name they are supposed to do with all those heaved-up cracking sidewalks?           The day you planted those Norway maples it was spring and everyone from the mayor on down was smiling.           Tell me something more tender than a beginning.           Walking home from a children's Christmas concert in a snowstorm, my graduate school husband asked me if I'd have a child with him. The lights of Chicago glowed orange against the falling snow so that it didn't look like night at all. The father of my children, who wasn't a father of anything yet, just a young man standing in a snowstorm, looked down at me waiting for an answer.           Fear not, the angel said, but how can I wake up and see everything that's happened, how this led to this led to this led to this, and not be afraid?           They straightened the sidewalks in Queens and the next year one of the trees whose roots they'd severed fell and crushed a busload of children. One tree killed a whole busload of children.           In our own little village, the lawyers told me that people with things to do and places to be were not making it to their trains on time; people in a hurry with things on their mind were falling down hurting themselves because I didn't allow for how much room the roots would take when I planted what I planted around the village.           In the beginning it's hard to even know the best questions to ask. Is this love? I asked myself when I felt what I felt that September night standing on the stairs looking at that college boy's chest. 'Is love enough?' never even occurred to me.           The day I brought that plant home from the K-Mart I did not think of the day to come, the day I got sick of failing and just put the thing outside and let it freeze. Some mornings I act as if I don't even see the dog when he starts to shake his head like there's something in his ear and he can maybe work it loose if he flaps his ears against his head hard enough. Instead of taking him out for a walk when he whines, I throw him another biscuit.           "The problem with trees," one of the lawyers explained to me as if I were stupid and slow, "is that they grow."           Arbor Day Bulletin #3 in entitled Resolving Tree-Sidewalk Conflict but that's a lie. Sooner or later it comes down to a choice: sidewalks or trees, school or the dog, am I going to lift up my eyes and let this man kiss me or am I going to keep staring at his chest—muscle, rib, breath, heart, blood—long enough to think to ask myself, Is there enough room for this in my life? (Luann Jacobs is a second-year student in the MFA program at Sarah Lawrence. She lives in Larchmont with her husband and three sons.)