Remember our backyard plum tree, the one felled by Hurricane Fiona? 

The remediation of the tree to vertical didn’t work out—we followed advice from our Siberian handyman that, untethered, it would find its way back; it didn’t.

But the tree is undeterred by its near-horizontal state: after a mediocre plum crop two years ago, this year’s harvest is bountiful, and the tree is filled with beautiful, firm, tart plums like this:

I picked a few pounds of plums yesterday, and turned them into a plum pie that we will have for dessert tonight:

I have another pie shell in the freezer and I’m going to try turning some of the tiny apples from our orchard into an apple pie next.

From The Rest of Our Lives, by Ben Markovits (emphasis mine):

The X-ray department seemed completely deserted, but then there was a light at the end of the hall, and a woman was waiting for me.

What happened next I can’t completely account for. Maybe it was because I hadn’t eaten all day, and then I took a lot of steroids, and then I had a lot of calorie-rich food. I had to stand up for the X-ray and press my chest against a vertical scanner, while the technician retreated to another part of the room. I also had to hold my hands above my head. She wanted me to do this twice, she needed two scans.

After the first one, I told her, “I have to sit down for a minute.” There was a gurney in a corner of the room, and I sat on that. My head had started to fill with blood, at least that’s what it felt like, and I was aware that my body had entered system protocols my conscious mind could no longer intervene in.

My body has done this. My mind has done this.

Craig Mod writes:

Here’s a good example of two books in similar genres, but one full of platitudes and one of unmistakable voice: Simon Boas’ A Beginner’s Guide to Dying — it’s fine, but it reads like the kind of book someone thought they were supposed to write, rather than a book that embodies the weirdness of who they were when confronted with death’s knock. (I’d love to read the end-of-life book that says: Be nasty, brutish, get as much money as you can, and die alone on your pile of treasures!)

I wrote an end-of-life book full of platitudes, a book that “reads like the kind of book someone thought they were supposed to write,” so this stings with the ring of truth.

Lisa and I drove out to Murray Harbour yesterday for one of the final days of the Brian Burke exhibition, Light Before Shadow. I spotted this piece on the first floor through the floor grate on the second.

Charlottetown is organizing Week Without Driving from October 1 to 8, 2026:

How would your days change if you had to give up your car for a week?

The Week Without Driving experience was created to give firsthand knowledge to those who have the option to drive about the barriers and challenges that non-drivers face.

This initiative is about more than just avoiding the driver’s seat. It’s a commitment to experiencing and understanding the daily realities of those who rely on alternative forms of transportation due to disability, age, economic factors, or personal choice. Participants are encouraged to engage in all their daily activities without driving themselves—employing any other form of transportation. 

I’ve thought for a long time that City of Charlottetown councillors should commit to travelling to council meetings by bus, simply to experience public transit and its opportunities and challenges firsthand. Here’s their chance, at least for a week.

Back on August 12, I made tweaks to this blog’s setup with a goal to improve its speed. 

I can now see the effect of these changes in Google “Core Web Vitals” report:

This chart shows that before I made the changes, every single page tested by Google was rated “Poor.” Starting in late August, Google started to pick up on the changes I’d made, and by early September, all pages were reported as “Good.”

I’d passed by Living Grace Café, on Belvedere Avenue in Charlottetown, hundreds of times over the years, but had never even thought of going in.

Yesterday, brother Mike proposed it as a spot for an impromptu family lunch, and so we went.

Not at all what I expected from a place that quotes 2 Corinthians 9:8 on its website: tasty sandwiches, all-day breakfast, friendly service, at very reasonable prices. All  in a space that is transformed completely from its earlier life as the Charlottetown bus depot.

Recommended.

Elizabeth Day interviewed David Sedaris for her How to Fail podcast, and asked him “What’s crystal meth like?”. His reply:

Oh, it just gives you, you know, you’re brilliant when you take crystal meth. You know, you’re just brilliant. And you have a lot to say.

And you feel amazing until it wears off. And then all you care about is getting more. And then when you crash, it’s like awful, you know, it’s just the lowest you’ve just ever been.

So you just got to keep it up. So you don’t ever feel that way. And you, you know, in my case, you know, you wake up a year and a half later.

And I mean, I just lucked out. My dealer moved town and there was no one to take her place. So I was like Billie Holiday in Lady Sings the Blues.

I know that’s such an old reference. I was just, you know, rolling on the floor and, you know, for days. And then I just thought, I don’t ever want to go through that again.

And she moved back to town and she hung her shingle back up. But I was like, nope, not doing that anymore. And later I had friends who would have math and stuff, or I’d be to parties and there’d be math.

And I never did it again just because I knew I’d be right back there. And if I was going to die in a few months, I wouldn’t do it. It’s ugly.

From The Sound of Children by Peter Miller:

It would be an interesting survey, measuring the sound of children in the cities. A scale, 1 - 10, of areas and space based on the sounds of a child.  It may be quite a surprise. In Scandinavian cities, it may be that the sound of children is evident in 40 - 50% of the cityscape. Yet a simple walk in Pioneer Square was almost a hunt for child sound at all. Few families live there and there are simply no schools, until the International District.

One of my favourite things about being a tenant at The Guild was Michael Pendergast’s Tuesday morning music for children happening on the other side of the wall every week.

You might think it would be annoying and distracting to hear the sounds of young children delighted by music, but it was wonderful.

A few years ago my friend Stephen and I were on a drive back from visiting the Kingston, Ontario hospice where his late mother had once spent time. 

Stephen pointed out a house with a blackboard out front: “they have a different Wendell Berry quote there every morning.”

Had I heard of Wendell Berry before then? Surely I must have, what with my connections to The Old Farmer’s Almanac and the Whole Earth Catalog.

Yet Stephen’s mention was the first time I remember consciously thinking about him as anything other than “generic homespun American writer.”

Then this morning, from Nova Scotia printer Andrew Steeves:

I was heartbroken to learn of the death of the American writer and farmer Wendell Berry yesterday in Kentucky at age 92. I don’t think any living writer more shaped my own thinking, and life, than Wendell did. I feel very lucky to have known him a little, to have met and to have corresponded, and to have shared a little in each other’s lives. At the time of his death, a letter of mine posted some weeks ago surely sat on his desk — possibly unread, certainly unanswered, a last hello trailing off into silence.

And this afternoon, from Vermont writer, activist, environmentalist Bill McKibben:

Wendell Berry, who died yesterday at the age of 92, was such a great man that I hardly know where to start.

Continuing:

I was very lucky that my wife handed me a copy of his essay collection Home Economics about forty years ago, when we were still courting. If I hadn’t fallen under his spell I’m not sure I would have spent my life in rural America, red state and blue; I know that he taught me how to see my town and my county, and my country and my species, in new/old ways that have undergirded all my work. And I’m very glad that we became friends, visiting and writing back and forth. His droll good humor rarely faltered, in my experience. I did not agree with him at all times, nor he with me—though he had solar panels behind his house, for instance, he didn’t think they belonged on farmland, while I think they’re a boon to both farmer and planet. But we agreed on most things of real dimension, and I was always delighted to see in the mailbox a letter with the return address of Port Royal Kentucky. He was one of the last people with whom I had a true written, as opposed to electronic, correspondence. Sometimes he’d tap things out on a manual typewriter, but more often it would be in pencil, on lined yellow paper.

That I read two reminiscences today, from different reaches of my network, about a personal correspondence with Berry surely must mean something. 

Perhaps I will discover him in death as others did in life.

McKibben quotes a Berry poem, published in The New Yorker last November:

The loved ones we call the dead
depart from us and for a while
are absent. And then as if
called back by our love, they come
near us again. They enter our dreams.
We feel they have been near us
when we have not thought of them.
They are simply here, simply waiting
while we are distracted among
our obligations. At last
it comes to us: They live now
in the permanent world.
We are the absent ones.

And here is Berry, from a review of the 1970 book Writers as Teachers: Teachers as Writers, as reviewed in The Whole Earth Catalog:

My aim as a teacher, as I have said, is to angle at large in the realm of the possible, to be always responsive to what might be. There is little chance of system in this, if by system you mean an ordered progression laid out in advance. If it goes as | think it should, there is no knowing what will happen next. It is when my students begin to go beyond what I expect, surprising and informing me, that I think the work is succeeding.

I base nearly everything I attempt on one assumption: that every person’s experience is in some way different from anybody else’s. Hence, everybody has something to tell me that i would be interested to know. The student’s task is to find out what it is and to write it well.

God bless Wendell Berry; you will be missed.