Sunday, March 1, 2015

March 4


The old maple up the road had little ice sickles dangling from a few places where small twigs and branches had broken away since last fall. This is a sure sign that maple sugaring will begin in earnest for those few who still hang the buckets from the maples.

It was cold enough this morning that the running sap, rising through root pressure upward to the branches, leaded out of these small break points in the maple and froze into miniature stalactites of attenuated sugar water.

Behaving just as the squirrels, I broke off a small sickle to lick it, and sure enough I could taste the faintest hint of sweetness.

Just west and south of Paxton in the Brookfields is a large maple sugaring farm. We went to tour there a couple of years ago, when the sap was in full pressure. What an operation, with hundreds of yards (miles?) of clear plastic tubing overhead, connecting all the tapped sugar maples to a central collecting vat. It was amazing to stand below one of the lines and watch the semi-clear liquid flowing toward the sugar house, a stream of sugar water interrupted occasionally with tiny bubbles in the tube.

The sugar house was a small barn that contained a large boiler vat of sorts, fed continually by a voracious wood fire burning beneath. Evidently, during the sugaring season, the fires burn night and day for a couple of weeks on end, boiling down the sap in the vats until the water component is sufficiently distilled to leave the concentrated syrup behind.

Like so many things, there was so much labor and time for such a small yet sweet reward.

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