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Well. The muffin this week is strawberry-rhubarb, and I will tell you right now I had my doubts. Strawberry-rhubarb is a pie. It has always been a pie. Putting it in a muffin tin felt, to me, like asking a barn cat to host a dinner party. But I was wrong, and I am big enough to say so.

The crumb is tender. The rhubarb is tart enough to wake you up but not so tart it makes your whiskers retract. There is a little raw sugar on top — coarse, the kind that crunches — and I would like to formally commend whoever made that decision. My cousin Frederick, who as you may know was an extra in something, would call it "a choice with intention." Frederick says that about everything. Frederick is exhausting. But in this case, he would be right.

I will note one small grievance. The muffins are a touch too large. I understand the impulse — generosity is a virtue — but a muffin should be a thing you can finish without commitment. My late husband Roy used to say that about his model trains, too. He'd build a layout, look at it, and quietly remove half. "If you can't take it in at a glance," he'd say, "you've put too much on the table." Roy was right about most things, and certainly about this.

Eugene the lobby spider, I should add, was unmoved by the muffin. He is on a strict diet of gnats and dignity. I respect him for it.

A small kitten — Mortimer, I think — came by yesterday and tried to eat the paper liner. I do not recommend this. The muffin is the part you want. The paper is for structure, and for handing to someone who is leaving.

Anyway. Get one before they're gone. Sit in the window. Watch the light move. That is the whole assignment.

The plum-cardamom muffin has returned to the case, and I want to say a few honest things about it. The cardamom is doing too much. I appreciate ambition, I do, but a muffin is not a perfume. When I lean in for a sniff and my eyes water, somebody in the kitchen has lost the thread. Frederick agrees, for what that is worth, though Frederick agrees with anyone holding a crumb.

The plum itself, however, is lovely. Tart in the right places, jammy in the others, and the little pockets where the fruit collapses into the crumb are exactly what a good Sunday muffin ought to be doing. If they would dial the spice back by a third, I think we would have something worth writing home about. Which I suppose is what I am doing.

My late husband Roy used to make a plum preserve every August — slow, low, no fuss, one cinnamon stick and that was it. He always said you should be able to taste the fruit before you taste the cook. I have thought about that line many times sitting in this window, and I think it applies to muffins as much as it applies to anything.

Eugene was on the corkboard this morning, which I took as a quiet endorsement of the weather. The radio was playing something with horns. A kitten named Mortimer came in with what I assume was his person and pressed his nose directly into the pastry glass, which I thought was rude but also, in fairness, correct.

I will be ordering the plum-cardamom again next Sunday. I am hopeful. I am always hopeful. That is the deal you make with a small cafe — you tell them when the cardamom is a bit much, and they tell you when the rain is starting, and everyone keeps coming back.

Well. I will say I did not expect a plum-cardamom muffin in late May, but here we are, and here it is, and I have eaten two. The plums are the small purple kind, slightly tart, and whoever is back there in the kitchen had the good sense not to drown them in sugar. Cardamom is a spice you have to respect. Too little and it tastes like nothing. Too much and you are chewing soap. This week, they got it right.

The crumb is on the denser side, which I prefer. A muffin should have some structural integrity. Roy used to say the same thing about birdhouses — he made them, the year before last, out in the garage, and not one of them ever blew off the post. The man understood a load-bearing seam. A muffin is not so different, really, if you think about it long enough, which I have.

I shared a corner of mine with Frederick, my cousin, who came in unannounced as he tends to do. He claims to detect "a whisper of clove," but Frederick claims a lot of things. I tasted no clove. There may have been a faint orange zest along the top — I'd believe that — but no clove. He stuck by it. He always does.

The corkboard has a new flyer pinned crooked over the old one about the rummage sale. Someone might fix it. Someone might not. The radio was playing something with a clarinet earlier, which is a fine thing to bake to, I imagine. Eugene was in his usual spot in the lobby corner and seemed unbothered by all of it.

Anyway. Get the plum-cardamom while it is still on the chalkboard. These rotations don't last. I am told next week is something with lemon, which is fine, but this one — this one I will be thinking about on Tuesday.