It really felt like spring today… I was cleaning snow from the driveways in prep for up to seven fresh inches tomorrow, and yet… it felt like spring.
No… that's not quite right…
it smelled like spring.
I remember it clearly although I haven't experienced it in fifty-five years. Cold nights and warm days… the maple sap flowing… the hot breath of the huge Belgium workhorses. Warm sun on snow still two and three feet deep but growing softer with each passing day…
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| Brunneras carpet the spring soil warmed by the sun |
The dripping of sap into galvanized buckets hanging on spigots that we'd drilled holes for and hammered into place. Buckets, each with a couple gallons of the sweet sap that we drank straight from the pail… I can remember the delicate flavor as if it were yesterday…
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| Spring has its way with the land… |
As the sun grew high overhead, we'd put wieners and eggs into the huge evaporator as moisture vented up and through the specially designed cupola structure that was a part of every sugar house… (it's said that it's not a real sugar house if it doesn't have a cupola!) we'd keep the fire under the evaporator roaring and our lunches would soon become infused with the natural sweetness of the thickening sap…. we ate our fill, realizing that we'd wear it all off before this day of hard work was done and we'd head home down the mountainside in the setting sun…
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| A real Vermont snow storm captured by my sister two days ago and amounting to some 18" of fresh snow. |
There would be more storms and more snow, but we knew it was spring because we smelled it in the air and we watched small rivulets forming over the ledges and down the embankments and the steep road with its meager covering of gravel that took us deep into the forest in search of the very oldest sugar maples that had been giving up their nectar for decades before I was even born…
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| My dad and his sister long before I was born |
The sap went from pails to a heavy sled affair with a cistern and would be dragged back to the top of a curve in the road that was really little more than a gravelly trail and offloaded to a small hut with a second larger cistern… eventually from that point gravity would take the sap downhill and into a much larger cistern that sat high above and to one side of the evaporator inside the actual sugar house so that the sweet sap's flow into the evaporator could be controlled with a spigot… as I look at this photo from the late 20's or early 30's with my father on the sled, I am amazed at the open space that by my time in the 50's had become lushly forested. Certainly these woods had been cleared generations earlier, but nature always has its way and the empty spots soon become full…
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| Signs of spring these days include epimediums, anemones, primulas and lewisias |
Indeed my world has changed… I remember the times when fresh snow meant we could try our hand at 'sugar on snow' as we whipped the syrup in a container of new snow creating a rare treat, a sort of maple snow cone with actual snow rather than crushed ice. The syrup… now that was something special! None of this dark brown stuff I see brewed up here in the mid-west. My grandfather had a little wooden structure that had openings that contained little glass jars of maple syrup… each was progressively lighter in color indicating a higher quality and each day's batch would be graded by eye using this gauge. The goal was always" #1 Grade A Fancy" which these days may be called "Grade A Light Amber".
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| My grandmother on her front porch when my father was a child |
At other times in my grandmother's kitchen, syrup would be boiled down even farther (much farther) to create maple sugar candy. I don't recall a candy thermometer… the practice had probably been so developed over time that one was not even needed… as children we had no problem devouring something so sweet and we made short work of any we were offered…
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| Nature's pointillism… |
But I've digressed… I'm sure I did smell spring today… just as I did when I was a boy in the mountains of Vermont. One just doesn't forget things like that…
Larry
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| Into the wood… |
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