Maple.

Eventually it's going to be time to sugar again.  It must be sneaking up on us now, right?  Right?  We have some books on the subject if you are looking for how to boil your own or maybe you'd like to read some stories and lore beside the wood stove before we slip into spring.

Here's an excerpt from the song "Maple Sweet" written by Perrin Batchelder Fiske in 1837. (We used to have a Pete Sutherland cassette tape with this song on it and I remember singing loudly along to it during sugaring season while navigating muddy back roads with the windows down for the first time since the fall before.  Good times.)

Oh you say you don't believe it
Take a saucer and a spoon.
Though you're sourer than a lemon
You'll be sweeter very soon.
'Til everyone you meet
At home or on the street
Will have half a mind to bite you 
For you look so very sweet!

Radiance & Please Take Our Survey!

First of all please, if you have not done it yet, take our survey!  

And now… Radiance of Tomorrow by Ishmael Beah...

I picked this up the other day and read the first few pages.  I can't wait to sink  my teeth into this one.  Here's what got me:

…The places I come from have such righ languages, such a variety of expression.  In Sierra Leone we have about fifteen languages and three dialects.  I grew up speaking about seven of them.  My mother tongue, Mende, is very expressive, very figurative, and when I write, I always struggle to find the English equivalent of things that I really want to say in Mende.  For example, in Mende, you wouldn't say "night came suddenly"; you would say "the sky rolled over and changed its sides."  Even single words are this way  -- the word for "ball" in Mende translates to a "nest of air" or a "vessel that carries air."

If I express such things in written English the language takes on a kind of new mode… When I started writing this novel, I wanted to introduce all these things to my work.  They are part of what makes language come alive for me.