Olive Syrup was something Olive and I had shared on our birthday since we both shared the same birthday, July 1st. At school I was constantly made fun of because of my name (Maple) and so was she. A lot of times I was called Caple Maple.
One day at the beginning of the school year,we had a sub for Mrs. Edwards class. He went around the class and gave everyone a rhyming word to go with their name. Mine,obviously, was Caple Maple. No one in my class knew what caple meant so they had the sub explain it. He said it was a horse. But of course, one of the idiot boys in the back called out,
"Oh yeah, she's a whore all right!"
And the name stuck.
Olive was just made fun of because she was kind of small, like an olive. So, we made a rather odd confection called Olive Syrup. Her aunt from Vermont would provide the maple syrup from her Maple trees at their farm and I would supply the olives from my own personal garden back at the farmhouse. Every July 1st we would climb that tree with a bowl, tinfoil, 3 spoons (one for me, one for her, and one to mix with), and obviously the Maple Syrup and olives. We would climb up to the branch at which I am perched on now, and mix the ingredients together. We would let it sit in the bowl wrapped in tinfoil and let it cook all day. Throughout the day, we would play in the brook or try and catch Mr. Grey, the rabbit , for a pet ( though we never did), chew mint leaves and/or add them to the syrup, and sometimes we would go through the trees and up to the meadow where thousands of bright flowers grew and we'd pick some to take home to our mother's later.
Finally, as the sun begins to set over the rise, we would climb up to our branch and the syrup would have settled into a warm mixture. It was tangy but sweet and rather enjoyable. We've both hit bumps in the road and the tangy olives mixed into the sweet sugar symbolizes this.
Up until Olive went missing, we've made Olive Syrup for the past seven years.