Maple-syruped

Although the researcher put regional needs in logical order, New Englanders have long known on what side their toast is maple-syruped.

Brunch was the time you could order maple-syruped pancakes with your sausages and eggs and swill it down with champagne without feeling guilty.

Knowing there was no possibility of lunch, he’d got up in time for the maple-syruped waffles that never added weight to his skeletal frame, but he had hoped for coffee.

The provenance of materials is proudly trumpeted, and the inventive impulse continues through to desserts such as maple-syruped waffles with an ice cream flavoured with both vanilla and Tag Lag beer, this last ingredient provided by the on-site Barngates brewery.

In families everywhere flashes of brilliance burst forth from loving glances at morning light, from hugs served with orange juice and real maple-syruped pancakes, in the flutter of quick airborne kisses at the door on the way out, from cell phone midday checks to learn if all is well, and from nighttime visits to a child or a grandma, bedded down beneath a soft blanket.

I’d settled in before the soothing lilt of TV, pain dulling with the heat of a hot water bottle, maple-syruped stack and liquid Tylenol taking effect, when my mother came in the room zipping up the brown leather rucksack, stuffed to fill its shape.

“She does, but she always chokes,” Darius said, fighting to remove a paper napkin from his sticky, maple-syruped fingers.