This week I write to you from the North Woods, smoke filling the air from Canadian wildfires, lakes stretched out between shorelines of white birches, balsams, red pines, and giant boulders. The liquid sound of the wood thrush in our Appalachian woods is replaced by the trill of the northerly hermit thrush, whose song extends several seconds longer than our wood thrush. The ground floor is drier than our rich Carolina soil, so mushrooms are already a distant memory.

As multiple outings are part of the package in these parts, I am looking for transportable food. I stop into the local sugar house to pick up a gallon of maple syrup, and the owners hand me two dozen eggs from their garden-fed hens. The choice becomes obvious.

No matter how many of these we have consumed in our lifetimes, we

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