Sugaring Season

I’m remembering the year my brother and gathered sap and boiled it down over an open fire to maple syrup more than a decade ago. Hour after hour, day after day, emptying buckets, hauling buckets, stoking the fire pit with logs to keep the syrup boiling, but not boiling over. Though more than once we did boil it over. The smell of burned maple syrup, an earthy, smoky caramel aroma that lingered like a reminder to be more attentive to the fire, to the sap, to the sugaring season we adopted on a whim because… the adventure of it, mostly. And the wonder of buckets running over, watery sap transforming into sweet, golden treacle.

Sugaring season is steeped in tradition, in humble reverence for the alchemy of nature, in collective effort and camaraderie, in storytelling, in re-syncing with seasonality. In the Adirondacks, sugaring season is a cultural ritual as sweet as the coming of spring.

Sugaring: Authentic maple syrup is an Adirondack staple. Remember the smell and flavor of real maple syrup, before corn syrup and artificial flavoring and coloring elbowed their way onto the breakfast table? Sugaring is as much a gourmet delicacy as it is a theme of story lore. Extracting maple sap and concentrating it into syrup or sugar wasn’t just a local sweet source before grocers and box stores. According to Bill Yardley, sugaring provided an occupation for lumberjacks during mud season.

(Source: Skipping Mud Season)

That interesting observation about sugaring as a mud season alternative for lumberjacks — new to me when I wrote that previous post in 2012 but still making plenty of sense to me a dozen years later — surfaces in this charming video.

And now for my own poetic attempt…

The Poetry of Maple Sugaring Season

Sugaring

Sweet sign of spring,
daytime warming,
nighttime freezing,
maple sap drip,
drip, drip, dripping
into spile-hung,
rusty roofed pales.
Plunk, plunk, plunk, splash.
Stored energy
flowing like a
memory tapped,
clear as water
until reduced,
concentrated
by friends around
fire crackling with
stories, laughter, 
and ambering,
sugar shacking
per tradition.

And did I forget to mention the sweetest treat of all? When the syrup is thickening, ladle a spoonful (or two!) onto clean snow. Once the syrup hardens into the snow, pop it into your mouth. Bliss! Can spring be far away?!