Receta The Fruitlessness of Hope

When I was ten, my father made the well-intentioned error of taking me to see Gone With the Wind on the occasion of its 40th anniversary theatrical re-release. I may have walked into the theater thinking we were about to watch an Irwin Allen-style disaster film about hurricanes, but I walked out four and a half hours later obsessed with Vivien Leigh, faking a Southern accent and, of all things, desperate for a peach I begged and begged my mother for one. We were the only family on the block whose yard did not bear fruit. The Gerritzes on our left owned a highly productive apricot tree, about  a third of whose branches hung over the wall into our own yard. The Hoffarts across the street grew beefsteak tomatoes and lemons. The Ayers…