Sugar

Warmish days. Cold nights. The sap’s a’runnin’.

Sunday, a bright sunny day, we went up to Merck Forest and Farmland for their annual sugaring celebration. A few years ago, they built a massive sugar house on the property, within walking distance of the visitors center. It’s a two-story building that houses the largest evaporator I’ve ever seen.

We ate blueberry pancakes with fresh grade-A dark-amber maple syrup. We ate sausage made out of previous farm residents of the swine persuasion. We allowed ourselves to be enveloped in thick sweet steam, like a sauna.

The wet sweetness that fills the lungs as the sugar boils—the surrounding outdoor air just warm enough that you can begin to smell the forest again—takes me right back to my college days when we’d head out to sugar at our school’s field station on the lake.

Back then we collected the sap in buckets, grabbing them off the trees and emptying them into a tank on a flatbed attached to an ancient tractor. It was great exercise and great fun (as we usually limited it to a weekend or two, and it wasn’t our job or our livelihood).

I don’t think the college added IV lines to that operation until sometime after I graduated. Here in Vermont, you can see these blue tap lines all along the roadways. They aren’t as aesthetically pleasing as the buckets, but they are, obviously, way more efficient.

Lambing happens about the same time as sugaring, and already many lambs have made their debuts. One ewe was in labor during our sugar stay. She was surrounded by spectators, and she was having a hard time. I didn’t stick around, but I heard that she eventually got a little human help, and her lamb was born safely.

Today we are in the midst of mixed precipitation. Tomorrow it may be 60 degrees F, but rainy. Possible thunderstorms.

On Route 30 today, I saw the steam rising from some of the smaller operations.

Syrup. Spring.