Once I was asked what food I could not live without, and I did not respond with “chocolate.” Or cake. I answered, yogurt, and that answer still holds. Yogurt, Nigel Slater, one of my favorite food writers, says is what he starts and often ends the day with. Yogurt with berries and honey, yogurt added to soup or spicy lentils, made into a lassi, or simply eaten with rice. Curd ( yogurt) rice, or Thayir Sadam, was the way I ended most meals growing up. Tempered with mustard seed in hot oil, with green chilis I carefully fished out, and eaten with spiced vegetables, or lentil broths.. I was not one for too spicy foods as a youngster , so I tended to wash the baby mango pickle under the tap before eating it as a condiment to the rice.

Yogurt was the all in one remedy for stomach ache. My mother heated milk every day to make the evening yogurt, but I have never made it myself. Instead I buy plain yogurt in quart containers weekly. Sometimes I get the kind with the cream on top. My niece once asked me on the phone what I planned to eat for dinner. She was in New Jersey, and I was in Colorado. I told her. She said, “and you can have yogurt for dessert, and if you were very good, you can have honey with it.” She was three or four at the time. Truer words never spoken.

Mornings would be my go to answer for a favorite time of day, because of coffee, the light, the quiet. Morning is when you discover if had snowed the night before.

But when I wander in the garden on a summer night that still has light, when I offhandedly tend to the flowers, stooping behind the rose bush to pick away the leaves with black spot, breathing the cool air, then I get enchanted. I get struck by the quality of the time, the beauty of the light.

I am waiting for a melon to ripen in the vegetable plot. I think tomorrow might be the day. It should drop off its stem when it ready. I am tempted to take the scissors to it, but I will resist. Have provided a bed, and am willing the beetles to keep away. Two more are growing, but at a slow, slow pace.

What happens to the garden at night?

As it turned out, I did not resist. I cut the melon and took it home, and rose a sea of doubt. It is supposed to rain hard, but all I see are blue skies behind the clouds, and some sun.

There is a chance the melon will taste of cucumber, because a cucumber plant grew near it. So much chance and probability in this world. And there is the law of averages, which I imagine is the general weight of history and predictability. When did I stop writing fiction? Months or years? What was the day, and why was that that significant?