Good morning. “That old September feeling,” Wallace Stegner wrote in “Angle of Repose,” his 1971 novel about the myth of the American West, “…another fall, another turned page: There was something of jubilee in that annual autumnal beginning, as if last year’s mistakes had been wiped clean by summer.”

Which is to say, it’s time to get busy, time to make granola for the week’s breakfasts to come, to lay in a turkey breast to make cold cuts for the lunches ahead, to draw up a shopping list for the market that will yield a week of dinners ahead. I’ll help with the recipes, and together we’ll make this the best new beginning yet.

Because all is forgiven from your behavior, January to August: all those delivery orders you called in too often in the dark days of winter and into the spring; all those terrible greasy pizzas you picked up near the train station on the nights you played Overwatch in your neighbor’s basement; all those takeout orders from Lucy’s Football Café that left you on your back, every time.

You spent the summer getting your feet wet, maybe, with tomato and watermelon salad and speedy fish chowder, weeknight grilled ribs, the occasional banana muesli smoothie. You know you can cook.