It’s the grande allée between green bean and Hubbard squash season. Maybe my favourite vegetables. Sorry, celery root. 
 
I like to blanch beans, quickly fry them with garlic, and snug them against a roast chicken. Good hunger is standing beside my friend Ghaithaa at the stove while she makes Fasoulia with the flat green beans she loves. Sizzling heaps of thinly sliced garlic and green onions in ghee.
 
An embarrassment of salted butter is all a roasted Hubbard squash needs. 
 
The garden grows like a fever in September. A desire path, a wheelbarrow tire wide runs between it and the kitchen.
 
***
 
Scarlet rosehips are luminous in the dinnertime sun. A geisha’s lips. Spent blooms hang like an Issey Miyake among them. The Rosa Blanda metamorphosis. The scent on a hot July night hangs in memory’s closet.
 
***
 
I recognise myself as a writer while reading Duncan J. Watts, Five Feet at a Time. I’m working on a project and striking out in several directions, like the ink blots. A colleague once commented on my mind-map note-taking. My concentration on one thing caps out at three hours. Of course, I can get caught in a flow that lasts a day. But in figuring out how to be productive, I’m learning to flip the switch. And the solo climber metaphor he uses in the title is the way. 

***
 
I don’t have much extra, but there’s always enough for: 
 
Eating cassis sorbet in Trinity Bellwoods. The French know how to extract the lush essence from fruit. Ripeness has to rise above the numbing effect of cold. In flavour and texture, sorbet is a masterclass.
 
Stopping at the Polish deli for a raspberry donut. Two quarters change back from two dollars. A cheap thrill. Puffed like a foam pillow stuffed in a velum sugar case. Carried home in a small brown paper bag. Eaten while I make coffee. 
 
***
 
The songs go out to a friend from high school.

​“Their increasing liberation makes the country itself more beautiful.” 
 
Sentiment for the times. 
 
Rebecca Traister on Thelma and Louise. Maybe the best paragraph about a movie ever written:
 
“It’s not just that Thelma and Louise get inarguably hotter with every discarded lipstick, floral blouse, and trapping of conventional femininity; it’s that, in Khouri’s script and through director Ridley Scott’s lens, along the geographically impossible road from Oklahoma to Mexico, their increasing liberation makes the country itself more beautiful, both to them and to us. These women and their willingness to disobey, hang up on, laugh at, and even kill the men who degrade and underestimate them are not a blight on the nation; rather, their trek west, toward imagined freedom, flatters America, lights it up from within.”
 
***
 
Eating three perfect Ontario peaches in two days in the last week of August is haute seasonal. Like Gucci, but fruit. A Las Vegas fountain for the taste buds — passionfruit and tamarind and lime and agave and what-else. 
 
A few days later, they were mealy. The season comes to a smoke and screeching tires halt. Louise behind the wheel of the Tahoe Turquoise 1966 Ford Thunderbird Convertible — "peaches."

Stories of the week: 
 
“This paragraph took three fucking hours.” Ed Yong on practiced intentionality. Crazy good.
 
A guitar and a mahogany tree from The Met.
 
***
 
There was a trickle of emails waiting for me on waking last Sunday — messages about orchards. Thank you, universe. 
 
One from a friend telling me of a heritage apple tree they inherited with their Wolfe Island property — a St. Lawrence. The poetic embrace of location and tree. The watercolour by Deborah Griscom Passmore is on page 144 of The Ghost Orchard. 
 
If you’d like to get today by email, please send me your address. Then check your junk mail.
 
***
 
Music from two women. The Maya Delilah song is a new jewel. Phoebe Bridgers singing Metallica.