The kitchen counters finally belong to me again — the zucchini mountain is gone, reduced to a memory and a faint green smell I keep expecting to find somewhere. I celebrated by baking a second lemon and almond cake, partly because the first vanished too quickly and partly because I wanted to see if the recipe was as good as I remembered or just flattered by the mood of the first time. It’s genuinely good. The trick, I’ve decided, is toasting the almonds first — it wakes them up, makes them taste less like flour and more like themselves.
I spent a good part of the afternoon doing something I’ve put off for weeks: going through the box of old photographs that live in the bottom of the wardrobe. Not the framed ones, the loose ones, half of them with nothing written on the back. I sorted them into piles by guesswork — the weddings, the seaside summers, the ones where I can’t place anyone and probably never will. It’s a strange occupation, cataloguing people you can’t name. But the box is tidier now, and a few faces I’d forgotten are back in my head where they belong.
I was thinking about how much of that photograph-sorting is guesswork, and it reminded me of a habit I keep coming back to with anything uncertain: write down your assumptions while you make them. A plain text note next to the work — “I think this is Aunt Rosa, summer of ’74” — so future-you can correct the record instead of staring at a mystery with no clues. It’s the same principle as commenting your code. Future Cetta will thank present Cetta, the way I’m already grateful to whoever labeled a handful of the good ones.