girl dinner

there’s something about stonefruit

dive into this girl’s mind while she eats mushy stonefruit for dinner on a sticky Australian summer afternoon

turns out all you have to do to find the beauty in the world again is cycle to the markets and buy a peach so ripe it mushes all up in your bag. while you’re there, grab a glass of wine at the winery booth and a cone of gelato at the gelato booth. sit outside with your bulging bag of mushy stonefruit and lick your cone of melty gelato while your wine warms in the sun. read a book and contemplate going to see the new rom com at the movie theatre by yourself, but don’t buy the ticket in case you get home and don’t feel like biking against the wind to get there. in the moment, though, think about how nice it would be to put on a sweatshirt and buy a bag of popcorn and slurp up one of those giant diet cokes. remember being a teenager and going to the movies with your sister every weekend; eating so much sour candy you couldn’t feel your tongue, and giggling for hours about nothing at all. think about what you would give right now to watch a movie at the north edmonton cineplex with your sister and drive your moms old minivan home.

when you get home, unload all the mushy stonefruit from the crocheted bag your mom made you when she visited last. chuck your favourite cutting board on the counter, the one that reminds you of the cutting boards your pepere used to make (specifically the one that sits in a box in your mom’s spare room, patiently waiting with her for your return). chop up your freshly rinsed plums, nectarines and peaches- first up will be the black plums. don’t let the first piece spend even a second on the cutting board. bring that gooey juicy mess right up to your lips! taste the sweet, summery freshness of it. let your mind flash to your mom handing you bowls of cut up stonefruit, each slice evenly cut. here, in your own kitchen, you cannot fathom how she cut them so perfectly. yours are a mess, all wonky and misshapen. smile to yourself and say out loud: “whatever! yum!!”

now, for dinner you’ll eat your wonkily sliced up stonefruit and fresh, creamy marinated feta. the kind you could eat straight from the jar if that was the kind of thing people did. “What did you have for lunch, Beatrix?” “Oh, this delicious jar of marinated feta!” “Oh, how marvelous!” you’ve just watched Miss Potter and now your internal voice is a fancy british lady from the year 1900. british ladies probably didn’t eat fancy cheese with rice cakes from the IGA, but I think they’d approve of a young woman watching her figure. or, in your case, a young woman who bloats for a week every time she eats bread. pish posh, same difference.

and so is the magic of stonefruit. a regular degular afternoon, uninspired but for the galing wind blowing the trees around in a cacophony of leaves-against-leaves. a girl attempts to find something to do in a beach town when the beach does not appeal to her, and is saved by the sweetness of a peach. until next time.