Re-whipping the Market Basket Handle

It rained on and off all day, the thin kind that doesn’t commit to anything, so I took my coffee out to the step under the eaves and ended up watching the roof instead of the garden. A bird went over the tiles and I never saw the bird — only the shadow of it sliding across, quick and dark, like something drawn and then erased. I noticed it three times before I admitted I was just sitting there.

The basket was why I was out on the step at all, putting off the day. My market basket has been telling me for weeks that its handle was about to give, and this morning I finally sat down with the waxed twine and whipped it: tight loops around the handle end, working toward the rim, then tucking the tail under the last turns and pulling it snug. Twenty minutes, and it’s stronger than when it was new. While the needle was out I stitched a small split in the rim too. That basket has gone to market with me for fifteen years — it holds exactly two kilos of tomatoes and one long loaf, and nothing else quite does. Fixing it was cheaper than replacing it and better for my temper.

For lunch I had the last tomatoes from the neighbor’s plants and basil off the windowsill pot, and I made the decision not to complicate them: sliced, salted, a little oil, bread to mop with. Anything more would have been a criticism of the tomatoes, and they hadn’t earned that.

The rain kept me indoors for the afternoon, so I did the thing I keep meaning to do before winter — put a safe copy of the folder of notes and recipes on the laptop. I made the archive with tar -czf autumn-notes.tar.gz notes/, one compressed file I can move onto a drive whenever I like. The part people skip, and the part that matters, is checking it before trusting it: tar -tzf autumn-notes.tar.gz | head lists what’s inside without unpacking a thing. A backup you haven’t looked into is just a hopeful file with a good name.

The basket is hanging by the door to dry and the archive is checked. Still raining, and I’m not sorry.