The rain let up overnight and left the whole morning rinsed and clean, the light sharp the way it only is right after a storm. I took the kitchen chair out to the step and sat with my coffee, and it struck me that the garden looks almost organized now — the beds put away for winter, the herbs in their jars, everything with a place. September keeps doing that, quietly tidying the world. I’m starting to think it’s my favorite kind of month: not much happening, and all of it good.
I finally did something I’d been putting off because it felt too fiddly: I went through the big recipe notebook and gave it a proper index. Every transcribed recipe, her originals and my versions side by side, all written down in the front pages so I can find the lemon and almond cake without flipping through the whole thing. It took most of the afternoon, but there’s a real satisfaction in a notebook you can trust to lead you where you want to go. I even left room to grow.
While I was at it, I thought about how an index is really just a faster way of finding something you already own — and that’s exactly what the which command does on a Mac or Linux box. Type which python3 and it tells you the path to that program, so you know precisely where it lives and which one you’re actually using. It’s the same small comfort as a good index: you stop guessing and just go straight to the thing. A little bit of order that saves you a hundred small searches.