sugaring

#21

16 Mar 2025

Dear Shera,

Over a dozen silver maples grace this little piece of land. Most are 50 years old or more. One toppled during severe winds last spring. The main trunk missed us entirely, laying itself down alongside the house, but I was upstairs when it fell and saw it (blurrily) out a window during a loud rushing downpour. Once the storm passed (there was in fact one tornado at that hour in the next county over), we surveyed the damage. A branch had landed on the clothesline, which was easily re-strung. Brett got to work with his chainsaw and trailers and within the week only the 3’ diameter section remained. Remains, I should say.

We are sugaring right now. We’ve only ever tapped two or three trees in a given year. You drill a small hole and stick in a little spigot which drips into a bucket. Forty parts of sap boils down to one part syrup. Boil too far and only sugar will be left, hardened into a slab you’d have to shatter like I did jawbreakers as a kid: with a hammer.

The first few years we boiled sap inside on the kitchen stove and steamed the paint off the ceiling. It flaked down like snow on all the counters and floors, into our food and hair. After repainting the ceiling twice, I declared a moratorium on indoor boiling. Five years went by until Brett at last built an outdoor stove from Kasota granite blocks. His taps have been running all week in this decidedly spring weather. He has boiled enough gallons of sap to result in 10 pints of syrup, so far. We do filter and finish the last bit inside. Sitting outside in the lea of the wind behind the helmhouse (a garden shed) is a lovely way to spend an afternoon. Moist, maple-y steam mingles with the puff of woodsmoke and Brett’s pipe. One day we may enclose the stove with a proper sugaring shack, but this year the weather has been beautiful out in the open. The sun shines warm and strong through late winter’s leafless canopy, lays like a blazing blanket on your face, spills over stocking caps and shoulders as the melting snow streams in rivulets across our slope.

What does one do with liquid gold? Drizzle it over steel cut oats. Make yourself a batch of egg pancakes. Or mix up an old fashioned or whiskey sour. Wherever possible, substitute maple-y goodness.

Jonathan Rogers wrote recently about a wine fountain along the Camino de Santiago. Those who pass through on pilgrimage are welcomed to refresh themselves with the merriment of lavish abundance. Water turned into wine. I can’t help but think of all this overflowing snowmelt, sunk underground, siphoned up by roots, rocketed skyward, and poured out drop by drop into our buckets, turned into syrup.

Pilgrims pass through, but we get to live here.