For Mark, and the landscape described in this story, with some artistic licence. For fancy wine and heart nuts and bad tea, and our favourite 'top chef'.
And for my grandfather, growing up on the farm and tapping the sweet maples.

The landscape would always take my breath away. On a crisp, cold morning in December, or with the evening light dying in July, it must have been one of the most beautiful corners of the world.
Better still, it was our corner of the world.
Two houses, in the middle of nowhere. Decent sized, wooden affairs with a roofed, trellised walkway joining them. In the summer, the vines and creepers would shade you from the sun, in the winter you would have to run along the raised planks unless you had had time to pull on your snowsuit.
I had spent many winters legging it as fast as I could along the walkway so I wouldn't get too cold, until my mom had strung a thin wire between the two buildings, and with some careful drilling, some spare planks, and a lot of squirty insulation foam, had set up a system so that she could pull a rope in the house, and a bell would ring in the culinary school.
I don't know why she didn't just phone my dad when she needed to relay a message to him.

Beyond the walkway, the ground started to slope downwards towards the river. A hedge separated the family garden from the rows of grape vines behind the school. On the school side of the hedge, a collection of beehives stood in a neat white row.
By the water's edge were some willowy silver birch trees, and across a small bridge was a light forest of sweet maple trees. We tapped those trees in the winter, making a tiny amount of syrup, but we had our own honey, our own jam, and our own wine- although it was pressed and all by our neighbour. We had a small orchard, and a good sized vegetable garden.
My dad always insisted that the best ingredients were ones that you grew or made yourself, and that was very obvious in his school. There must have been some truth in his words, however, because the Klausman name apparently carried some weight in the Canadian culinary world.

I tended to steer well clear of that, however. Yes, we may have often had fancy this and fancy that meals, but he had also refined the art of mac and cheese, and the infamously simple roast chicken. Poutine and fine wines were equally common in our kitchen. And, above all, my childhood favourite: French toast.
All my life, people had been terrified of cooking for my dad, but they had never realised that it didn't matter what he was served- he loved something about all foods. He could tell between my mom's cooking, and mine, even when we both followed the same recipe, but he loved both equally. He lived, not necessarily just to eat, but also to cook.

My mom however just cooked, and ate, to live. It was funny to watch her get frustrated over his insistence about ingredient origin.
They happy bumbled along, annoying each other in the best possible ways. The Swiss chef and the Mexican-Canadian interior designer.
She had designed the entire of the school when it had been converted from a house, and she was often to be found redesigning various rooms in our house.
But when I had wanted to paint my room an awful shade of green, she had even helped me, and then just sat back and waited for me to grow up and see the error of my ways.
A layer of artistically bluey-gray paint had gone over the wall of terrible green, and then all the trim in my room had mysteriously become a dark blue colour when I came home from my first semester at college.
I hadn't complained, though. The dark blue was much better than the black I had started doing but never finished.

The smells of cooking and emulsion paint smelt like home.
I just hoped that Atticus would come to love the landscape, the smells, and the people, as much as I did.

Atticus was, well, something else. He had grown up in northern Toronto, and had just never left. He was a varsity player, loving soccer and football, but lacrosse was his main passion. I loved watching him play, speeding across the pitch with his stick, an invisible smile lighting up his face behind his helmet. His cousin Roman was a hockey player for the Flames, but Atti had never found sport to be a race between them. It had never become a competition, or a chore. He truly loved the thrill of being out on the pitch, with the roar of the crowd. Sometimes he joked that he loved me almost as much, but I knew he would drop it in a heartbeat if he had to, just for me.
But I would never ask him to do such a thing. It would wipe that amazing smile from his face.
A smile I was starting to see grow, as he looked around him.
After the stress of the university finals, he had jumped at the chance to see where I had grown up, the chance to spend a few weeks out in Lincoln, and the chance to meet my parents.
And the scenery had not let me down.

"You told me it was beautiful- you didn't say this beautiful." Atti smiled, lifting our bags out of the back of my mom's car. He sniffed the air slightly, the smell of flowers strong on the breeze, lavender and roses; with faint undertones of whatever was being cooked in the school.

"I'll take those." I offered, smiling at the sight of him laden down with bags.

"No you won't." Atti smiled.
If there was one thing better than the scenery, it was his smile.
He had seemed more relaxed once I had told him that my mom, who he had already met, was the more terrifying one. My dad was only scary in the kitchen. But despite this, I could tell he was nervous. Meeting the parents was always a scary prospect. I had met his family ages back, as he lived at home rather than in university accommodation like me. After finding that out, I often teased him, calling him a mommy's boy, but he knew how to tease me back equally well.

Dad was teaching, so rather than let Atti start worrying, I pulled him down the hill, towards the river and the sweet maples.
He was looking around him as we walked, noticing the white through the hedge. "Beehives?" He asked, interested, and I nodded. "Cool." I tugged his arm slightly. "Alright already?" Atti laughed at me. "I'm coming, B."

He paused on the bridge to look down at the water. The bridge was only a few telephone poles held by sleepers at either end, but it was stable, and strong enough to hold the barrels of sap that we collected in the winter.
"Hey, B, ever swim in the river?" Atti asked, finally stepping off of the bridge, and standing next to me.

"Only when it's really warm." I shrugged, and he followed me in amongst the maple trees, until I came to a stop. "Here."

"Wow." Atti muttered, looking at the den in front of us. It had been a fall's hard work, with my mom, one year, and it was still standing.

"I come here to relax- at least, I did." I muttered.

"Not anymore?" He asked, slinging an arm around my shoulder.

"Well I've been at university." I shrugged. "I'm a stranger in my own house, now."

Atti pulled me into a hug. He somehow knew that being back wasn't necessarily easy.
We headed back to the house after hearing my dad shout our names. He was stood on the veranda, grinning at me.
"Beren- you should have interrupted the class!" He called over as we walked up the hill towards him.

"Sorry Dad!" I replied, but we both knew I would never.

"God, does he already hate me?" Atti muttered into my ear.

"No, he was saying I should have said hello as soon as I got home." I said, quickly translating the Swiss German for him.

"And you didn't and now he hates me?" Atti asked.

"Stop worrying." I smiled. "He doesn't hate you."

"That's right, I don't!" My dad called over.

"That's not helping, Dad!"

"He can't even understand me!" My dad laughed, heading inside.

"Okay so now he hates me?" Atti smiled nervously.

"Okay, seriously, stop worrying. He doesn't hate you. He's even more childish than me, sometimes. He might make it seem like he hates you, but that's because you're dating me and he feels like it's is duty to scare off boyfriends. But honestly, a butterfly is scarier than him, trust me."

"Okay." Atti smiled, kissing me lightly. "I trust you."

Of course, the newfound calm on his face didn't last long, as my dad was to be found in the kitchen, chopping vegetables at supersonic speed, with rows of terrifying knives on the wall in front of him.

"Jeez okay trust broken." Atti whispered.

"Shut up." I laughed, kissing him.

"Gayyyyyyy." My dad whistled, finally speaking in English so Atti could understand him.

Atticus blushed slightly. "Well, I am. Sir." He added quickly. He was stood almost to attention, and I smiled slightly.
I slipped my hand into his, and he relaxed, but not very noticeably.

"Well I'd be worried if you weren't at least a little bit gay." My dad laughed. "That is my son's hand you're holding, after all. And hear that, Beren? Sir. Maybe it's time I got some respect."

"You'll get respect when you earn it." I laughed, picking up a piece of carrot and munching it.

"Fair enough." He shrugged. "Get out of here then."

"Is that it?" Atticus whispered to me, as we headed towards the door.

"Yes that's it." My dad called over. "There were no tests for you to pass, I trust his judgement. Nice meeting you, Atticus."

I dragged Atti up to my room, and he sat on the bed, still in shock. "Your mom interrogated me, your dad had knives. Not sure who was worse." He whispered.

I laughed. "Hey, it's okay. They love you already, I can tell."

"You're not just saying that?"

"Of course not." I smiled. "If Mom hadn't liked you, she would have taken you straight back to the university. If Dad didn't like you, you'd have found yourself roasted and stuffed and served for dinner."

"Not sure I'd taste very good." Atti mused, but he was smiling.

"Trust me, he manages to make even eggplant taste good." I laughed. "Anyway you taste amazing."

"Shut up!" Atti laughed, hitting me lightly with a pillow.
It was good to see him laughing, to see the clouds of worry clear from his face. "Hey, B?"

"Alright then." I laughed. "Get your shorts, we'll go down to the river."

He grinned, and soon we were running down the hill and jumping into the cool water, his shirt and his reputation thrown aside.
We splashed around, laughing, passing the time until dinner.

It was the first time in years that he wasn't loaded down with sport fixtures; instead, he had been signed on to a lacrosse team, starting in just over a month.
This was my chance to show him everything about where I had grown up, to introduce him to the art of mac and cheese, and the madness I had grown up with.
It was my chance to ask him to spend the rest of his life with me.

Messing around in the water, with droplets flying everywhere, I somehow knew that he liked the landscape as much as I did.
It had been an unspoken fact that I would someday inherit the land, and hopefully he'd agree to inheriting it with me, when the time came.

Up in my room, and always on my mind, was a small box.
Maybe I was unimaginative. Maybe it was because he'd grown up with a run of the mill, traditional, family. That didn't make them boring, but it did mean he'd been brought up expecting that he'd have an identical family.
He wasn't going to get a family identical to his father's.
I knew he didn't mind, that he was confident in himself. But I also knew that deep down he secretly like all the almost cheesiness of traditional romance. I had discovered that one valentine's day, when I hadn't expected him to actually do anything, so had been caught out.
The least I could do was make it a traditional proposal.