I got home just in time for the peaches.

After being away from Toronto for most of the summer, returning to the city earlier this week was particularly delightful, a time of year when town and country come together. Every supermarket and neighbourhood greengrocer is overflowing with produce from around southern Ontario. The two are in symbiotic unison right now, and the countryside is more than just a place to escape to on the weekend. Not all places are so fortunate.

The glamorous stars of this fruit and vegetable pageant are the Ontario peaches. People go wild for them, buying them by basket or even bushel and raving about them whenever they can, so much so Health Canada should check if they have a secret narcotic in them that casts an intoxicating spell.

Part of why we go away is to appreciate and get some perspective on home. At least I think that’s why we spend lots of money on something as ephemeral as travel. When the trip’s over, there’s nothing to show for it but the pictures we took, the tchotchkes we bought and the fancy foreign cheeses of questionable legality that were smuggled back home.

On the domestic side it’s nice to know we can live quite well without all our stuff. Yet all that stuff, the burden we drag around from home to home, is part of our identity, and returning to it all is a comfort. Outside of our homes, the city is yet more stuff that defines our collective identities. Just look at all those Jays caps people are wearing around town right now.

While away I started to read The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone, a fantastic new book by British writer Olivia Laing. It’s an exploration of how we can be disconnected from the people and places around us sometimes. In it she recounts the near-inexplicable difficulty she had ordering a coffee each day while living in New York.

In trying to understand why that was happening, she turned to philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein who wrote of the hidden difficulty of travelling elsewhere: “The silent adjustments to understand colloquial language are enormously complicated.” That’s the thing about being home: knowing how everything works without thinking too much about it.

Right now in Toronto that kind of knowledge might mean knowing what subway stations and surface routes are equipped to take the half-useless Presto cards and to carry some tokens as backup, a temporary but frustrating setup that must confound newcomers daily.

Problems like these, especially when one knows it can be better, are anger-making and exhausting. When travelling, other cities seem to do things better, but more time spent anywhere reveals local problems and conflicts, just like here. The grass may still seem greener elsewhere, but maybe not as sparklingly green, and the local problems are somebody else’s deal anyway. The problems back home are our problems. Our very personal, shared, public problems.

Perhaps the cliché of Torontonians always thinking about work is too true, but the work-in-progress that this city is makes it exciting. Any city that is “finished” — and not many are — becomes boring, a museum to somebody else’s vision. Toronto, an awkward, sometimes cranky, often obstinate teenage city, has all the potential. New buildings opening each month, new people arriving every day: They’re all additional ingredients to contend with. This place is boring only to those who aren’t paying attention.

It’s Labour Day weekend, still weeks of summer left, but come Tuesday morning the city will be running at full power again with people back from vacations and institutions such as schools starting up. The hum of the place will be audible, the subways and sidewalks more crowded. Frustrations abound, sure, but it’s good to be back, and nice to have everybody back in town, too.

Shawn Micallef writes every Saturday about where and how we live in the GTA. Wander the streets with him on Twitter @shawnmicallef