Maple syrup season, part 1

March 31, 2017

IMG_0103A lane leads east from the fields on our farm into the forest. A culvert runs under the lane.

The other day I woke up to snow on the ground. I walked through the snow and ice and mud down the lane towards the woods. When I crossed the culvert I could hear water trickling through the pipe. The water flows from the creek on the north side of the lane, through the pipe, into the big swamp — a collection of trees and bullrushes and grasses — to the south. The trinkle of water is encouraging — a sign of spring.

Many, many years ago, a former owner of the farm abandoned a sugar shack in our woods. All that remains is a horseshoe-shaped ruin of a firebox that must, at one time, have held an evaporator, to boil sap into maple syrup. Rusted out sap buckets and pots lie scattered around among the young maple trees.

As a child I made maple syrup with my parents and siblings on the big farm where I grew up in Quebec. Maple syrup is in my blood now, and I have always dreamed of making some syrup of my own.

My romantic notions of sugaring off season, as it’s called, are apparently all my own; my sisters mainly  remember how wet our socks got when we gathered the sap. And they are right.

We wore rubber boots from Canadian Tire, and tucked our jeans into the boots. The snow was thick and crystalline on the paths and around the trees. We’d plunge through the snow to get to the buckets on the trees, and the snow would go over top of our boots and fill our boots with snow. Then we’d pour the sap from the tree buckets into larger white plastic bucket.

As we schlepped the sap from the trees to pour it in a barrel perched on the back of the tractor, the sap would slosh out of the buckets and mix with the snow in our boots. My feet have never been as cold as they were in soaking wet wool socks, encased in snow granules, inside a rubber boot, standing in the snow.
I asked my mom about it the other day.

“I just remember that we were incredibly underequipped for the job,” she said.