Why was Grant so serious about the syrup?(Grant POV)

"Hey M...Grant?"

"Hm?" I look up from my pancakes to see Amaryllis waiting to ask me a question, "What is it?"

"You seemed...intense...about the syrup. Is there something I should know?"

I laugh self-consciously, "It's just a thing. When I was a kid, my elementary school was surrounded by black maples. Once a year, just before the start of winter, we would tap the trees to make syrup out of them. To this day, the best syrup I ever had came from a tree that I tapped myself when I was 10. I suppose you could say that as someone who has experience in the craft, the poorly made stuff bothers me. Like how taking a creative writing course makes you really capable of noticing bad writing."

Amaryllis cocked her head, "Grant, where are you from?"

"Ontario."

"They have maple trees in California?" Amaryllis seemed genuinely shocked at this.

"No. Well, maybe they do, but I'm not from that Ontario. Ontario is a province in Canada," I answered. Until I moved down to the States, I had never heard of Ontario, California, but it seems that no one in this country has ever heard of the most populous province in one of the two countries that they neighbour.

The education system here really is shit.

"Oh Canada," Amaryllis said, as if she had just remembered that the country existed, "So, why'd you move down here? Too tired of all the free healthcare and gun control?"

I laughed, "No, more like too tired of people not hiring me for the job I went to school for."

"What job was that?" Amaryllis asked.

"Developer," I said.

"Like Real Estate?" Amaryllis asked.

"No like programming, computers. Y'know, bip bip boop boop," I said.

"Bip bip boop boop?" Amaryllis asked flatly.

"Would you rather I gave an in-depth explanation of how an itemized array compares to a linked list compares to a skip list?" I said dryly.

Amaryllis waved off the question elegantly, "No no, bip bip boop boop is good enough for me."