"Well into the 1800s, maple sugar was the only sugar readily available to North Americans.  However, in the late 1800s, the cane sugar industry in the Caribbean began to compete with the homemade delicacy.  After a war that included tariffs on the refined, tasteless white sugar, and bounties for maple sugar production, maple sugar gave way to the mass-production economy of cane sugar.  During the first half of the twentieth century, except for brief periods during World War 1 and World War II, when maple sugar helped ease the North American sugar shortage, maple sugar and its companion, maple syrup, became delicacies valued for their flavor rather than for their sweetening power."

Today, maple syrup, not sugar, is the favored maple product."

~ Sugartime, The Hidden Pleasures of Making Maple Syrup with a Primer for the Novice Sugarer,  Susan C. Hauser, Key Porter Books Limited, 1998.

[Photos:  Haldimand, March, 2016. lbw]

"...the fear of hurting someone's feelings may be having a chilling effect on solid conversation in general ~ not only political conversation.  At dinner parties I've attended, the topics of conversation mainly were restaurants, vacations, and health ~ all safe subjects.
To engage in small talk is often enjoyable and it certainly is "polite," but a steady diet of conversation about food, vacations, and health is tedious.  "Politeness," La Rochefoucauld says, "is essential in social life, but it should have limits;  it becomes a kind of slavery when it is excessive."
...
"Yet it is hard to avoid saccharine politeness when the alternative is often the angry venting of opinions.  Judith Martin says that "she would be only too happy to welcome the return of substantive conversation at dinner parties; goodness knows she is weary of hearing people talk about the food.  But conversation requires listening respectfully to others and engaging in polite give-and-take, rather than making speeches and impugning others' motives and judgment."

Conversation requires listening respectfully to others and engaging in polite give-and-take, rather than making speeches and impugning others' motives and judgment.

"Anne Applebaum, a Washington Post columnist, warns against discussing politics at dinner parties.  'Anyone who has ever even invited guests of opposing political persuasions over to dinner will know how quickly it can all go wrong....A chilly, polite dinner is more bearable than one that ends with guests stomping out the door'."

 

 

~ Stephen Miller, Conversation, A History of a Declining Art, Yale University, 2006.

"You're my friend ~
What a thing friendship is, world without end!"
~ Robert Browning, The Flight of the Duchess

"In every mess I finds a friend."

~ Charles Dibdin, Jack in His Element

"Money can't buy friends
but you can get a better class of enemy."
~ Spike Milligan

"Sir, I look upon every day to be

lost, in which I do not make

a new acquaintance."

~ Samuel Johnson

 

"Even if we take matrimony

at its lowest, even if we regard it

as no more than a sort of friendship

recognized by the police."

~ Robert Louis Stevenson, Virginibus Puerisque

~ THE LITTLE BOOK of Friends, A Compilation by Brockhampton Press 1996.

"And who will walk a mile with me
     Along life's weary way?
A friend whose heart has eyes to see
The stars shine out o'er the darkening lea."

~ Henry van Dyke, A Wayfaring Song

[Photo from cover of a 1935 book by J. Hartley Manners titled, Peg O' My Heart]

"My lover spoke and said to me,

Arise, my darling,

my beautiful one, and come with me.

See!  The winter is past; the rains are over and gone.

Flowers appear on the earth;

the season of singing has come...."

 

 

~ The Song of Songs

 

"There's nothing half so sweet in life as love's young dream."

 

~ Thomas Moore

 

VALENTINE'S DAY is Sunday, February 14. [Photo files:  Jackson House, King Street & Centennial, Stoney Creek. lbw]

 



"Today there are two elements that go into friendship, each so sovereign that I can detect no superiority in either,... - One is Truth.  A friend is a person with whom I may be sincere. Before him I may think aloud....-.  The other element of friendship is Tenderness....- When a man becomes dear to me I have touched the goal of fortune....-.  I wish friendship should have feet, as well as eyes and eloquence.  It must plant itself on the ground before it walks over the moon...-.  The essence of friendship is entireness, a total magnanimity and trust.  It must not surmise or provide for infirmity.  It treats its object as a god, that it may defy both."

~ Ralph Waldo Emerson, "Friendship and Love"


VALENTINE'S DAY is Sunday, February 14

"Do you know what it is to be a child?  It is to be something very different from the man of today.  It is to have a spirit yet streaming from the waters of life;   it is to believe in loveliness, to believe in belief;  it is to be so little that the elves can reach to whisper in your ear; it is to turn pumpkins into coaches and mice into horses, lowness into loftiness and nothing into everything...for each child has a fairy godmother in its soul."
 
~ Francis Thompson (1859 - 1907) English poet, writer.
 

Smile for Today ~

Erskine [John] was to lecture at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, and the president of the university went to the station to meet him.  He had some difficulty in recognizing his guest, however, and told Erskine about it at dinner that evening:  "I asked one gentleman if he were John Erskine and he said, with emphasis, 'I should say not.'  I asked another, and he said, 'I wish I were.'  Which shows that at least one man had read your books."
   "It does indeed," replied Erskine, "but which one?"

~

Eriskine was once asked if he found it disconcerting to see members of the audience looking at their watches during a long lecture, "No," replied Erskine, "not until they start shaking them."

~ERSKINE, John (1879 - 1951), US educator & writer, professor of English at Columbia University.
THE LITTLE, BROWN BOOK OF Anecdotes, Clifton Fadiman, 1985.