There's a venerable, stately maple standing behind the main house of the complex where we annually and briefly rent a cottage in the Waterville Valley of New Hampshire's White Mountain range, that we have long admired. The owners-operators of the complex are proud of that huge old tree. Just as they take pride in the other portions of the mostly-evergreen forest on their property.

We've been going to that particular site, which is pet-friendly allowing us to take along our little dogs to share our mountain-hiking vacation, for quite a few years. Over the decades we've travelled there, first when our three children were pre-teens and for all the years of their growing into maturity, we stayed at quite a number of different places.

Now that we've ourselves grown into elder-maturity we seek out hiking trails that we can still manage, rather than the mountain hikes we once sought out with our eager-to-go children. We're so familiar with the proprietors of the cottages we've latterly been using that we consider them to be personal friends, and the feeling is reciprocated. We watched, over the years, as their own children grew beyond their teen years into adulthood.

Their parents, aside from maintaining their motel-cottages complex, also work other jobs to ensure that they had sufficient funds to help their three children attend university. This pair is the most efficient, industrious set of people we've ever met. Byron, like my husband, can turn his hand to just about anything, from electrical-mechanical to carpentry. He and I enthuse about gardening because he's an avid gardener, as well. A trait he inherited from his genial, knowledgeable father.

Byron does all the maintenance on their property, while Donna, his wife, looks after all the demanding day-by-day upkeep involved in renting out their units; the labour of cleaning each one when vacated is hers alone. Fresh towels are provided daily and kitchen waste is disposed of daily as well, for those cottages with fully-equipped kitchen facilities.

Byron has full-time employment at a fairly local enterprise totally geared to tourism, which operates a steam train and ski lifts. Byron's specialty aside from being a Jack-of-all-trades whom the enterprise depends upon, is the running and care of the steam train. As busy as he is he never tires of satisfying his curiosity about how things operate. Occasionally Donna takes work there as well, but she specializes in sewing draperies, and she also does real estate.

When we were last there in June, he proudly presented us with a jar of maple syrup that he had himself produced, tapping that majestic old maple. This morning, I used the rest of the maple syrup, left over from the many uses I'd had for it up to now. I thought I might experiment and bake a maple syrup-blueberry pie; something different, a combination I'd never before thought of.