Mangoes

Great news for those of us here in Toronto: the summer mango boxes have arrived—actually a couple of weeks ago now, as of the writing of this blog post. We were driving through the Gerrard India Bazaar, along Gerrard East west of Coxwell, and to my surprise, given the cold weather and the seeming endless winter we had been trapped in at the time, there were boxes of mangoes all stacked up, rows and rows of those bulbous orange fruits. We had to pull over and Jon picked up two boxes. The first half box went within an hour of returning home.

Now, though, it feels as though summer is already here. Warm weather, warm mangoes. The seasonal fruit of Ontario is lovely and sweet and fresh, but the mangoes are the ones that truly announce it for me. You can get a paltry facsimile of mangoes from some supermarkets year round, those large, pale yellow, hard rocks, massive and unappealing, sawn through with a steak knife, sour enough to pucker your face for a week, suitable only perhaps for a smoothie, and if that’s the case, you might as well buy them frozen. These ones, the ones that begin arriving in late spring, you buy by the box because between you and the kids, six will be gone in one sitting, Naomi systematically going around and gnawing the flesh off everyone’s pits, a pile of skins on everyone’s plates.

In any case, life trundles on. I am enjoying my stationery these days. I am reading and writing, futzing around with my pen and notebook cases, moving stickers and cards from here to there, sharpening up my pencils. In the lulls between the excitement of new acquisitions I am writing with my old favourites and feeling the satisfaction of pages being filled up.

The quiet moments before the kids come home from school seem to go quickly, laundry, phone calls, appointments, product photos, defrosting meat, forgetting to defrost the meat, the minutiae of life, googling miracle cures for cat diseases, snacking over the kitchen sink. And so it’s sometimes nice to take a moment to slow down, let the minutes drift past you, the day turning into a translucent scarf of a memory behind you.

I didn’t do a blog post on my analogue system for the year, mainly because life was trundling past me, and my disorganization continues to reach for and achieve all-time peaks. But I am using my TSL A5 leather notebook as a reading journal, and my B6 Galen Leather case currently houses a smaller and more manageable morning pages notebook. Pens and pencils are, as always, interchangeable by the days and weeks and seasons. Writing about blueberry pie for dessert, sunny drives along Dundas to pick up Naomi from school, big plans for the shop, small plans for life, or maybe the two have gotten mixed up a bit here and there.