2.28.26 | 🍊 I'm in a season of giving and receiving

Welcome to The Weekend Edit, a Saturday ritual from The Good Trade featuring our top 10 reads of the week and a note from one of our editors.

Happy weekend!

Our family is lucky to have a few fruit trees in the front garden of our Los Angeles home. Lemons, limes, grapefruit, oranges, and pomelos.

There’s more citrus than we can eat, so we’re often filling baskets for the neighbors, sending friends home from playdates with grocery bags, or tossing bowls around the house for decor.

But there’s one tree that’s caused me a particular amount of grief — and guilt.

It’s a bitter Seville orange. Native to Southeast Asia, its fruit, as the name suggests, is incredibly bitter. The dry-your-mouth-out, turn-it-to-powder kind of bitter. Totally inedible.

Ironically, this tree is our most abundant. It brings all the rats and squirrels to the yard, but none of them even finish the fruit. They are as disgusted as we are.

One of the only good uses for bitter orange is marmalade. Seville oranges are prized for it, as they’re higher in pectin than regular oranges. But making a truly good marmalade is a fussy, labor-intensive process that unfolds over the course of a few days.

Dear friends, I confess: I am just not in a stage of life to make marmalade.

So the fruit hangs on the tree, a little withered and overripe. We throw heaps of unwanted oranges into the compost, and what we don’t harvest gets half-eaten by the rodents and rolls into the street.

Cue my guilt and embarrassment about the overabundance. And the mess.

It’s an unpleasant metaphor for things in our lives that we feel we should be making better use of — the time, the help, the resources, the opportunities — but simply don’t have the capacity to turn into something meaningful right now.

But this year was different...