The Cupboard That Held the Sound of Summer

I spent the morning rearranging the one crowded cupboard shelf I’ve been avoiding all autumn — the deep one in the corner where the preserves live three jars deep and you can only reach the front row without dismantling the rest. I took everything out onto the table, wiped the boards, and put things back in the order I actually use them rather than the order they happened to arrive. The tomato jars to the front, the ones for company at the back where they’ll keep. It’s the kind of job that looks like nothing and takes an hour, and I felt absurdly pleased with myself for the rest of the day.

While I was up on the chair I heard the dogs start up somewhere below the street — one of them barking at something only he could see, and then another further down answering him, and then a third somewhere past the wall, until the whole hillside was having a conversation and none of them knew what about. It took me straight back to a summer evening years ago when a dog I don’t even remember the name of did exactly the same thing and set off half the town. Nothing dramatic about the memory, no lesson in it, just a sound that arrived before I could stop it and brought a whole evening back with it, the smell of the stone still warm and somebody’s radio going through a window. I stood there on the chair with a jar in each hand for longer than the job needed.

Supper was nothing to write about in the fancy sense and everything in the real one: good bread, a dish of oil, a little salt, and a piece of pecorino to finish it. Some evenings the uncomplicated thing is the right thing, and I’ve stopped apologising to myself for it. The bread was a day old and better for it — torn, not cut, so the crumb keeps its edges and there’s something for the oil to hold on to. That’s the whole secret to eating bread and oil properly, by the way. Cut it thin and it goes limp in your hand. Tear it and it holds.

Here’s the small idea I keep coming back to. When I was putting the cupboard back I nearly wrote the contents on a scrap of paper and taped it inside the door, and then I didn’t, because I’d only be labelling it again next month. I’ve noticed I do this with files, too — name something badly once and you spend years working around the name instead of fixing it. Better to name it the day you put it away, when you still remember what it is. I did go back and rename one folder on the Mac this evening, and it took nine seconds and I felt nine kilos lighter.

The cupboard closes without a fight now, the dogs have gone quiet, and the house smells faintly of bread and oil. Fine day.