Maple Syrup: the book

June 3, 2025

               I wanted for a long time to write a book about maple syrup. I even started a couple of times, and I had a folder kicking around in my office, with some scraps of paper I’d typed with a pretty broken manual typewriter that had a faded ribbon. I typed those words up one night in sugaring off season when I came in from the sugar bush. That night, it gave me comfort as I typed to realize that, while I’ll never be a maple syrup professional, I am a story teller.

I thought that the book was a kid’s book. Basically, the story was about wet socks. When we were kids we wore boots from Canadian Tire to gather sap from the sugar maple buckets that hung on taps on the sugar maple trees at our family farm near Papineauville, Quebec. The uninsulated rubber boots really were wrong for the job. We shoved our jeans into our boots and as we clambered through the sugar bush the snow filled our boots. Then we lugged the heavy pails of maple sap through the deep snow and the sap sloshed into the tops of the stupid boots and mixed with the snow. My socks got really wet and my feet were frickin’ cold.

The soaking, freezing socks somehow seemed enough to anchor a kid’s book: you suffer, you get wet, and then you get redemption in the end at the sugar shack next to the evaporator where you strip off your wet wool socks, warm up your feet by the roaring fire under the bubbling, foaming sap as it boils, and sip the sap as it sweetens on the way to becoming syrup.

Anyways I thought about it a lot but I never got my act together. I did look up the topic, and saw that the books on maple syrup were either American, or corny olde-timey books about sugaring off at grandpa’s farm with the horse and sleigh, or both. So I knew there was room for a book, but I did nothing. Then quite as a miracle an editor at Doubleday Canada, Anna MacDiarmid, reached out to me, and asked me to write a book about maple syrup. I’d written a few things about the stuff over the years, in the National Post and the Globe and Mail, and the Narwhal picked up a Globe piece I wrote about how climate change poses a risk to the syrup industry. So I guess my name was out there as someone who cares about maple syrup.

Plus in the meantime I’d become a registered professional forester, so my bona fides to write a forest-based book had risen.

Anna MacDiarmid is a Brit; because we as Canadians are so close to maple syrup, we didn’t actually realize that there was a hole in the market, for a history book on maple syrup in Canada. Such a book just does not exist—until now, that is!

Continue reading

Union Station

March 14, 2025

The throng, horde, torrent, stream, the pure rush and gush of humanity, coursing like lifeblood through Union Station, cannot help but impress, even surprise, and carries for me a message of hope. I arrived at 8 a.m. in a taxi with my sister and niece, to put them on a train. A bit bleary, I went to search for a coffee. The station wasn’t busy—it was mobbed.
The workers, the students, the bureaucrats, and even the downtrodden of our nation’s metropolis are on their feet—in running shoes, leather dress shoes, clogs, loafers, fuzzy boots, thick-soled sneakers, pull on boots, carrying backpacks and briefcases and grocery bags; many with earbuds, all walking with firm resolve from the train station into the maw of 10 matching doors with signs above that say TTC/Front St.

Continue reading

Dry January

January 8, 2025

Dry January

I have a friend whom I met when he contacted me after I reviewed his book in the Globe and Mail. We met at a bar for a drink; we’ve been getting together every few months since then, which was a few years ago, usually for dinner or drinks, either near at a dive called E.L. Ruddy, which is a vegan watering hole down at the end of my block, or sometimes closer to his house, which is east of Yonge Street.
My friend heads to Argentina next week and we wanted to see one another before he left. But co-incidentally I’ve decided to do a Dry January. It’s something I’ve done over the last few years; harder than it sounds. I am not a big drinker but I do drink a beer or a glass of wine, or sometimes a bit of rye, a few times a week, and I’m trying to lose weight and I know alcohol is not good for you anyway, so I figure a Dry January is a good idea.

Continue reading

Bike lanes

November 24, 2024

Several hundred people gathered on the south lawn of Queen’s Park in front of the Ontario legislature on Saturday, Nov. 23, 2024, at 2 p.m. I went there with my son Frits, and our friend Francis met us there. We stood by the pedestel of a bronze statue of a guy named Whitney and we listened to about ten speeches. It felt really good.
The government of Doug Ford, the Progressive Conservative premier of Ontario, announced the other day that they want to rip out many kilometres of bike lanes in Toronto, including bike lanes on Yonge Street, University Avenue and Bloor Street. A lot of people are righteously pissed off about it.
I’ve lived in Toronto for 30 years this fall. Before I moved here I lived in New York. Before that I lived in Montreal.
In Montreal I rode a white Raleigh mountain bike to my job at The Gazette (weather permitting). At that time, more than 30 years ago, Montreal had safe, physically separated bike lanes. I used to ride down Berri Street from my home in the Plateau to my job at the newspaper. There was also a decent bike lane on de Maisonneuve Blvd at the time, and pretty good bike lanes too down at the Old Port and going out along the Lachine Canal. I rode my bike all the time. Once an off-duty police officer hit me on Laurier Street and left with nothing more than an apology; generally, though, I felt safe.

Continue reading

The wall

September 17, 2024

This afternoon before supper I practiced my tennis game, banging a pale green Wilson us open ball into the brick wall that spreads across from our house. As I banged the ball, the evening sun poured onto me from between the bars of the gate, painted Cadbury-purple, that bars entry to the west part of the factory. We bought this house in 2007, so we’ve lived across from the wall for 17 years. I grew up on a farm; we had a lot of cool stuff like hills to sled down and apple trees to climb, a river to swim in and fields in which to cross-country ski, and what seemed like a limitless supply of fresh vegetables, but we did not have any brick walls.

Is a brick wall an asset? I am not sure I would phrase it that way, but the red brick wall – four stories high, as long as a city block, and about a century old — and the Cadbury chocolate factory it encloses, are, if not friends, at least aspects of existence.

We have a love-hate, mostly hate, relationship with the factory; on Sunday morning they backed up a tanker truck to the wall and hooked up a hose to a proboscis that juts from the factory, and at intervals this truck emitted a whooshing sound that sounded like the air brakes on a freight train.

Continue reading

The Old Country

July 17, 2024

I am just back from a couple of weeks in British Columbia. It occurred to me that for me B.C. is the Old Country; where I am from; the crucible of old traditions that have stayed with me in my wanderings.

My parents met on a ship from the Netherlands and settled in B.C. in 1958. I was born in New Westminster. My parents split in 1964 and we went our separate ways; not sure exactly what led to the breakup, but is was a bit scorched earth I guess in the sense that neither of my parents, nor us three eldest kids, ever lived in Vancouver much after that. That said, both my parents went on to have kids with other partners. Now I have three siblings in B.C.: a brother in Surrey south of Vancouver, a sister on Vancouver Island and a sister further north on the mainland in the South Cariboo region.

Continue reading

Pay a fare to ride transit

May 27, 2024

On a recent Saturday morning I boarded the 506 Carlton streetcar of the Toronto Transit Commission, heading west. I tapped my Presto card to pay my $3.30 fare. I like to sit at the back, but it was occupied by a sleeping man, who had stretched out over five seats. I walked further ahead, and saw two other sleeping forms, one beside a cart filled with their possessions; the other sleeping on a bench with several bags tucked under the bench. I walked further forward; just behind the driver sat a fourth sleeping figure, next to a shopping cart.

I am quite sure that none of these riders paid a fare.

The TTC is in trouble. The commission notes that ridership in 2023 dropped to 70 per cent of levels in 2019, before the pandemic – even as Toronto has continued to grow. Fewer people ride transit because more people work from home. But that’s only part of the reason. The roads are as clogged with cars as ever, or more so; if more people work from home, whence all these extra cars? Part of it, I suspect, is that people choose cars over the TTC, because our transit system is becoming a refuge for homeless people, and riders feel less welcome. I feel less welcome.

Continue reading

Connections

May 5, 2024

Sabatino and Mario are friends.

I met Mario first. The other day as I walked our younger dog on the sidewalk by our house, a man  emerged from a house across the street. That house changed hands last year, and the new owners, who I think are architects, are doing a lot of work on it.

“Hi,” said the man, who was a bit older, perhaps 70, and did a good job filling out his work clothes.

“Hi,” I replied. “What are you up to?”

“We are rewiring this house,” he said.

“Oh, so you are electricians? Are you available?” I asked.

“I am not the electrician. He is coming out in a bit. You can talk to him when he comes out,” he said. He said his name was Mario. We shook hands.

A few minutes later a second man came out of the old brick house and walked through the yard to the sidewalk, and then down the street a few paces to where he’d parked his white panel van alongside the chocolate factory, across from our house. The second guy, whom Mario introduced to me as Sabatino, could not have been more physically different from the first. Mario is portly and of average height; Sabatino is tiny. They seem about the same age.

Continue reading

Earth Day

April 22, 2024

Happy Earth Day!

On the weekend I read environmental coverage in The Globe and Mail and some of it slightly depressed me. For example, according to the Globe about 70% of clothing is now made out of plastic, up from about half in the year 2000. The story suggested that, with people turning to electric cars, clothing is the new cash cow for the oil and gas industry. We are all buying more clothing than we used to, much of it junky fast fashion make from synthetic fabrics. Also scientists are finding micro-plastics in peoples’ arteries.

But the paper also published an encouraging story about a guy in Vancouver who planted a Douglas fir tree.

On Sunday I took our dogs, Coco and Rook, for a walk in High Park. I used to drive to the park but I realized that it’s just as easy, and more enjoyable, to take the TTC. Also it is better for the planet. The College streetcar was unusually crowded at about 10:30 a.m. Turns out lots of people were headed to High Park to enjoy the cherry blossoms. Rook sat next to a young man at the back of the streetcar. I think the guy was a bit unfamiliar with dogs but he smiled when Rook sat on his foot. Rook likes to sit on peoples’ feet.

Continue reading

Palermo

January 18, 2024

My sister Sylvia van Oort is travelling in Italy with my brother-in-law, Franc van Oort. They sent this from Palermo. Sylvia wrote the words and Franc made the drawing.

There is a place in downtown Palermo where everybody goes by at one time or another. We walked from our tiny apartment through a narrow alley, turned right and found ourselves on the via Vittorio Emmanuele, the main thoroughfare down to the sea. A few blocks down we came to the beating heart of downtown – I Quattro Canti, or four corners, where the two main streets of this city have intersected for many centuries. As both streets are now largely pedestrianized there was a coming together on this crossroads, as though two rivers were meeting, a large semi circular fountain on each scalloped out corner, with below each one steps, and above each rising three stories high, a  sculpture of dignitaries in 17th century garb, above which statues of angels, then more decorations, and eventually the roofs. Every type of person imaginable entered the space strolling about, or conversely determinedly going about their business. Tiny motorized scooters zipped through, often with two people plus bags balanced on them, parents pushing strollers, tourists with rolling suitcases, and the odd ‘carabinieri’ car who seem to be able to get anywhere at all.

Continue reading