Maple Syrup Time

Back in mid-March, we spent a fun afternoon in the sugar bush with our friends Todd, Elizabeth, and Grayson.

The sap was running well, and it was fun to introduce Maya to the idea of collecting something edible from inside the trees.

She was eager to help make the rounds and collect sap from each of the sugar maples they had tapped.

Grayson was a cheerful bucket-hauler, too.

Most of the taps were too high for Maya and Grayson to reach, but this one was strategically placed at toddler height. Check out this teamwork!

We had already spent an afternoon here in late February helping to put up a lean-to roof over the hearth that Todd had constructed near their house. Here's Nick enjoying the fire while steam rises from the evaporating pan full of sap.

We didn't stay to help tend the fire through the night as the sap thickened into syrup. (Forty gallons of sap boils down into a single gallon of syrup!)

But we did enjoy a taste of the slightly-sweet sap itself, straight from the source!

The last time I helped with a sugaring was 15 years ago, when I was working at Wolf Ridge, an environmental center in northern Minnesota. Then, the snow was still deep enough to trek around in snowshoes as we tapped trees and collected sap. This year, our snow was nearly gone, but it was still the right combination of warm days and cold nights for the sap to run.

Grayson and Maya spent part of the afternoon hauling the last of winter's snow piles down the driveway, but you can see that most of the ground is clear.

It's especially magical to be harvesting something edible from the wild in March, when the ground is still frozen, the trees still bare and leafless, and nothing is green or growing yet. Sugaring season coincides with Maya's birth month, so I find I'm appreciating this ritual anew as a way to mark a now-significant time of the year. This transition doesn't have the explosion of green that comes later in spring, or the abundant flowers and fruits of summer, or the stunning colors of autumn, or even the beautiful stillness and quiet of deep winter. But it is when something richly sweet and complex can be distilled from what looks like just water, straight out of a tree. 

And it's pretty much the only time you can load up a dump truck with a pile of snow and then zoom it down a clear driveway - with a look of both determination and glee.