It’s sort of a no-brainer, that when you move to the country and are surrounded by maple trees, you get….ambitious. Visions of a pantry filled with beautiful syrup fill your head. After all, it’s free!!!

I have long-ago memories of my parents collecting sap in their sugarbush in Maine. They would drag a toboggan through the woods, with a copper tub strapped to it, and buckets of sap teetering inside that. I hated slogging through the deep snow, but I loved the endless supply of thick maple syrup! My favorite part of the whole operation was, of course, the sticky sugar-on-snow at the end of the boil.

Back in Minneapolis, on our 1/8th acre of land, I planted a maple tree, and every spring it would leak sap all over the deck, which made me both sad and nostalgic. Couldn’t really get too excited about one tree’s worth, could I? Perhaps I should have tried. At any rate I was lucky to have an Uncle back in Vermont who made syrup, and every Christmas a carefully wrapped box would arrive. Thank heaven nothing ever got smashed-that would have been…..sticky. We doled out that precious quart of liquid as if it were gold. Of course, everyone in the Midwest thinks THEIR syrup is the best. (even worse, there are quite a few people who think Mrs. Butterworth is the real deal ) We Vermonters know better!

My first spring arrived. The snow was melting, and the air was sometimes warmish. Vermont was abuzz with the rumors that it was TIME. The local sugar shacks were sending up billowing clouds of steam. Up in the attic I found all my parents’ old sap buckets, carefully put away years ago, with their lids stacked and coffee cans filled with spiles and hooks. After consulting my book on the subject, I knew what size drill bit to use, and how far to drill in order to pop that spile into the tree’s veins. I had heard of not-so-smart Flatlanders who didn’t even know a Maple from a Beech, who ended up tapping the wrong kind of tree. Not me! By golly, I knew a dang maple tree when I saw one! I marched right out into my back yard and eagerly tapped 13 trees. (Lucky number). The sap started dripping immediately, creating a mesmerizing rhythm as it hit the tin buckets. Hubby and I gazed proudly at our pretty trees with their traditional buckets, and headed inside.

Hey, it works!!!

The next day we went out to collect the sap. No toboggan needed: we were close to the house, and we had a nice collection of giant water jugs. “Carboys”, my Dad calls them. We discovered that every bucket was filled to the brim. It only took a few trips with the jugs to fill our brand new 32 gallon plastic trash can with sap. And the sap was still running! Yikes! We had to get going, pronto!

We had two options for boiling the sap down: a sweet little open wood stove out by the barn, or a vintage 1960’s electric stove (brought all the way from Maine 45 years ago, and stuffed in a distant corner of the farthest barn). The decision was this: use up tons of our precious wood supply? Or pay for electricity, which here in Vermont is like paying for gold? Use the wood stove and be a slave to stuffing its mouth with wood for an entire day? or put that electric stove somewhere safe where we could just check on it occasionally? By this time the weather was cold again, so we opted to set up that ancient fashionable yellow stove in the garage (only place with a 220 outlet…) With all four burners on high, we could lay two evaporating pans out and start the boil. You’ve heard the ratio, I’m sure: 40 gallons of sap makes one gallon of syrup. That’s a LOT of steam. Well, Dad wasn’t too happy with all the steam swirling around the garage for hours on end, adding moisture to the attic. What to do? The plug was in the garage, and the cord was only 2′ long. Call a neighbor! Thank heaven for neighbors! Especially “handy” ones who have been around a while and have already done everything, long before I ever came along and tried to do it the stupid way!

With our newly borrowed 20′ long 220-volt capacity extension cord, we were now in business. The stove was working hard. I checked on it regularly, ladling fresh sap in when the trays got low, scooping off the foam, dreaming of my syrup. Alas, somewhere in the middle of that first day of slave-boiling slavery, as hubby trudged over with yet more jugs of sap, I realized what I’d set myself up for. With horror I calculated just how much sap those 13 trees were going to garner us, and how many hours sitting watching the yellow stove that would mean……..Reality is sobering. I quickly went out and pulled the plug on more than half of them. Whew! Hours went by. Work in the studio, checking the sap often. Do a laundry, check the sap. Start dinner, check the sap. Watch a movie, pausing several times to check the sap. Finally when it’s almost done, there’s no wandering off to do anything any more. All eyes are on the boil, on the thermometer. The frequency of tasting goes up.

Ahhhh, the tasting. Here’s the thing. In Vermont, there’s so much maple syrup, we can drink it BY THE CUPFUL!!! I’ll never forget the first time I visited our neighboring sugar-shack and I was handed a little cup full of syrup to taste. And another. And one for the road. When I’m boiling my own, many ladles-full go down the hatch as it grows thicker. What’s magical is how that thin sap, which tastes so faintly of maple in the beginning, gets thicker and thicker, and grows darker and darker. Hot and fresh, it’s better than anything you can imagine. Incidentally, it’s also full of minerals and antioxidants and other stuff that’s super good for you, so knock off the worry about calories!!!

There were many other lessons to learn. The 1960’s stove blew the fuse many times, so we had to run the burners a little less intensely. This added to the timeline. Then there was the time I tried to make maple sugar candy. One batch was successful: melt-in-your-mouth yumminess that didn’t last long around our house! The second batch was……hard as a rock. Tooth-breaking. An utter waste of all that time. Sigh. You can boil your syrup down too much (although honestly, I LOVE the thick stuff. It used to be called Grade C) or you can get impatient and not push it far enough. Luckily, I read that you can take all your “too thin” syrup, put it back in a pot, and boil it down further! There’s also the matter of that surface mold that can form on top of your syrup when you’ve made SO MUCH YOU DON’T EAT IT FAST ENOUGH!!!! Luckily it’s not harmful, just ugly, and it’s easily scooped off.

So, I ask myself, why do we go to all this trouble? There’s literally a sugar shack a half mile from our house. I could walk on down, buy myself a gallon or two, and be done. I’ll tell you why: the sense of accomplishment. The act of doing it yourself brings pride. Reaching up on the pantry shelf for another bottle when you’re hosting a bunch of hungry, pancake-eating teens is the best. Being a mom and a teacher, I am reminded of all the times a little child has insisted on “doing it themselves”. All the times I have waited, sometimes quite impatiently, as said child takes three times longer to do the thing themselves. And yet, there it is, that same sense of self-worth, of independence. We need that. As a culture, we have eased our way into these lives where everything can be had at the click of a button. And with every click of a button, people move farther away from an understanding of where things even come from. Learning to identify the trees on my land, tapping them and listening to the amazing drip drip drip of sap flowing into a bucket-in the most primitive way (buckets and spiles, instead of tubes….), one that’s been used for eons, is so satisfying to me. Watching the sap boil and slowly turn from clear to a lovely amber color is magic, and I can’t help but ponder who ever thought to do this in the first place?

Like many tasks and undertakings, waiting for maple sap to boil forces us to slow down, too. Just like gardening or baking bread, you can’t hurry the process. You learn the routine, the rhythm, and you work with it. You’ll make mistakes, and you will learn along the way. And let me tell you, that home made maple syrup brings some sweet, sweet, satisfaction. If you come to visit me, I’ll give ya a cupful.