Anyway, can’t stop now. After just four visits, my netcred’s has never been higher.

“Hi, Grandma!” Remember to smile.
“Good morning, Jared. How are you this afternoon?”
“Fine, Grandma! I came by for a story. And I just wanted to see you again.” Smile again. Place laptop bag on table, check camera running. All good.
“How’s your mother?”
Swallow impatience. Mabel hasn’t not let you down yet. “She’s fine.” Talk more, make her feel comfortable. “She’s making a presentation to the Museum board today. Something about raising the admission to dollar fifty.”
“I thought there was a rule that the museum couldn’t charge more than a dollar . . .”
“Yeah. Well, apparently, they have to raise admission just to keep the place running. You know, upkeep, something about refreshing the nutrients in the dirt, watering the trees with purified water or something. It all takes money.”
“When I was a little girl, my father had a forest. He had a couple acres of land.”
Bingo! Here we go. “Really?”
“There were maple trees, sugar maples. In the spring, the sap would start to run, and my brother and I would help your great grandfather collect the sap. Silver buckets hung on the trees, and Marvin and I would check the buckets, and bring the sap to my father for the evaporator.”
“What’s an evaporator?”
“Well, in the old, old days, people used to boil maple sap in cauldrons, but when I was a girl, there was a machine, like a cooking range, to evaporate the sap. It took a long time to make maple syrup, but I remember how it tasted! My brother and I would take ladles of the boiling syrup and drizzle it onto the remaining snow, so the syrup would harden. I always tried to spell Mabel with the dripping syrup, but I never got it right.”
Okay, she’s smiling. That’s what the onliners seem to like. But, imagine dripping tree stuff onto the snow for fun. The world before the Net. Yuck!

Okay, zoned out for a minute, but that’s okay. The cam keeps going. Anyway, I’ll see this footage when I do postproduction. Funny how Mabel is so boring, yet onliners eat this stuff up! This episode should get me enough netcred to finally buy into one of the exclusive webclubs.

How much footage I got? Maybe three minutes. That’s fine, onliners don’t pay attention past the four minute mark anyways.

She looks pretty sad. Sadder than when she talked about her brother. What’s she saying?

“Maple. I used to try to spell my name in the snow with the syrup. Maple.”