39 ~ Assisting the flow
Greetings.
These warmer temperatures have stimulated some generous flows of sap from the maples (this spring I have 23 taps in 21 trees), and the first batch of syrup is now on the shelf. This time of year brings one of my favorite indulgences of this feeding myself gig: brewing my coffee and tea with the clear maple sap instead of water. Sublime. If I could just license it to Starbucks, I could probably retire, and well.
The many observations of gratitude you contributed to the last post were wonderful, and quite diverse. We tapped and filled rich pot. Although varied, many of them threaded a common theme, seemingly paradoxical given the pandemic: a sense of greater connection, either with ourselves, or through greater appreciation of others in our lives. Along the same line, one thing I'm grateful for is this blog, and all of you who read it. Afterall, what is a writer without readers? It takes both, in community, so thank you.
I’d like to keep this going (it’s now 441 days since I last went grocery shopping), and see what we can discover together in the year ahead. As I noted in an early post, I am determined to keep the Bird in the Bush blog and its community of readers insulated from “surveillance capitalism” (see: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/24/opinion/sunday/surveillance-capitalism.html?searchResultPosition=6). This means I won’t share your email address and I won’t embed advertising into the posts. Although advertising would have the advantage of generating welcome income for me (my ‘real’ day job pays me only half-time), it would come at the cost of gifting the internet gods some of your personal data if you clicked an ad, which they would likely exploit at some point downstream. Let’s not go there. Instead, to support my continued writing of the blog, I would like to ask you to consider a goodwill donation. I much prefer that to advertising. You can support the arts (ad free!), and help keep us a bit clearer of the grasp of surveillance capitalism.
If you’ve enjoyed these posts and would like to make a modest donation to help keep the flow going, you can send a contribution through PayPal here, or you can mail an old-fashioned check to: Bill Robichaud, 7537 Lakeview Road, Barneveld, WI 53507.
Any amount would be much appreciated! And no amount, no problem. All are still welcome at this table. Thank you, dear readers.
Coming up in future posts: notes on maple sugaring, some recipes, thoughts on Wisconsin crane hunting, and a reflection on why I almost went catatonic my first time back in an American grocery store after losing 35 pounds in just six weeks in Afghanistan.