museletter #2

maple syrup and stuff

Sam Nelson
March 23, 2024

hello I hope this email finds you well etc etc okay here’s a jaunty little poem about making maple syrup

meet me by the maple tree

meet me by the maple tree where we will go to tap
syrup! flowing sweetly down your chin onto your lap
we can go and make molasses from delicious sap
just wait for the next spring thaw after the last cold snap

we'll drill a hole into the wood and watch the sap run out
all you need's an auger and a bucket and a spout
wait for it to trickle for a week or thereabouts
'fore you pour it on your pancakes or your brussel sprouts

we'll boil the sap and bottle all that sweetness in a jar
gaze inside the vessel at that amber reservoir
golden like a bullion and sparkling like a star
all this ichor from a humble tree in yonder mire.

I also illustrated it:

not my best art but I think the dog and bluebs are cute

when I first met tyler (the boyf) he had a jar of maple syrup in his fridge that he and his friends had collected from a maple tree. theirs was a rather bootleg production that didn’t look entirely edible, but he testifies that “[they] put it on pancakes and it was good”.

cursed liquid aside, I was enamoured, and scribbled down the first line of this poem. two years later I found this scribble and built a poem around it yay.

this is what my desk looked like as I was making the illustration

in other news,

and the amber glow it cast

the sunset last evening

I’ve been going to a lot of classical concerts. it’s a nice thing to do with an afternoon. sometimes I’ll be listening at the edge of my seat. other times I’ll read a book during them and just let the sounds wash over me

these flowers caught my eye for whatever reason

books

this week I read:

the graveyard book - neil gaiman
written by neil gaiman and illustrated by chris riddell – what more could you want? cry count: 0.5

the bookseller’s tale - ann swinfen
the slowest-paced murder mystery I’ve ever read. it's set in oxford in the 1300s, which was a cute backdrop (ancient bookmaking processes!), but the author kept going off on comically long tangents describing the layout of the college and town as they were back then. cry count: 0

music

some songs I have on repeat:

you can reply directly to this email! please do so if you have any inclination. tell me what you had for breakfast today.

thanks for reading to the end :) have a lovely day

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