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©Poems of R.F.Mueller- Other Times, Other Thoughts
FROM THE TALE OF PETER MINK
O Harry L. Smith, illustrator, you drew those winter maples like no one else, so well in fact that they've been my standard for five decades, and I never see the real trees, without noting that their fissured, platy bark and upward curving branches against a drab sky are Just as you did them. And this your inspired vision brings back again my childhood hunting days of autumn, the sharp cornered old roads bending through sugar bush and white cedar swales, abandoned byways long since undriven, and in the first spring nights the snow patches on flat plastered leaves of the maple woods with the gleam of sap buckets in the moonlight. annotation
As a very young person I was so fond of this story and its subject that my Mother was encouraged to invent another series of tales about a "Johnny Mink"! Also, note reference here again to the stolen moments with the maple sap!
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