Monday, January 09, 2006

Just A Teaspoon A Day

I'm considering taking a daily one-teaspoon dose of maple syrup, straight up, every morning (between OJ and teeth brushing.) I love maple syrup. The merest taste of it reminds me of slush-strewn Northern New England sunny March mornings, the whiffs of woodsmoke from who-knows-where, the sweet wafting of maple steam (no steam smells like maple steam) from someone boiling down, and the crouching, twitching, springtime about to leap from the earth. More than that, I suspect maple syrup is good for you. It has minerals drawn from the deep bedrock of hardscrabble land. It has sugars created and filtered by trees who've been creating and filtering sugar since before my parents were born. And somehow it just connects me back to a world I love.

When I thought of this idea, it reminded me of words from an alma mater, which always make my spine tingle:

"They have the still North in their hearts,
The hill-winds in their veins,
And the granite of New Hampshire
In their muscles and their brains."

3 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

My old housemates and I once argued over syrup gradations. We resolved the dispute with a syrup taste-off: 4 shot glasses each of fancy, grade A amber, grade A medium amber, grade B. Conclusion: we all need more maple syrup in our lives.

Another friend taps her trees and freezes the sap, thawing it in mid-winter to serve as "maple juice." Yum.

(I'll refrain from commenting on those Dartmouth boys with the rocks in their brains. ;)

1/9/06, 12:30 PM  
Blogger Katinka said...

(a dash of maple syrup is fabulous in Chai tea too!)

1/10/06, 2:00 AM  
Blogger Echomouse said...

Hello, I'm new :) LOL

I've wandered in from Girl MD.

This post reminds me of my childhood. Maple Syrup is awesome. In fact, you've almost convinced me to use it in my coffee instead of white refined sugar.

That motto could be for every person who grew up in the North :) Works for me!

1/15/06, 5:37 PM  

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