Goddess Magazine

SWEET TASTE OF SPRING Susun S. Weed March winds blow the sweet scent of maple sap boiling to my questing nose. When the days are warm and sunny and the nights below freezing, the sap rises in the trees. If those trees are sugar maples, then it is worth drilling a hole in the bark, inserting a tap, and collecting their sweet sap. There is so much sugar in sugar maple sap that it can be boiled and turned into maple syrup and maple sugar.

There’s about one gallon of maple syrup and ninety-nine gallons of water in one hundred gallons of maple sap.* A hot fire and a slow but steady boil send that sweet-smelling water vapor high in the clear, cold sky. The March wind blows it to me. I close my eyes and remember my years of “sugaring”, making maple syrup.

There’s something special about a task that requires one to stay up all night. Maple sap starts to ferment if it is left at normal temperatures for very long. Once ten or so gallons of sap have been collected, the boiling begins … and cannot be stopped until the finished syrup is achieved many, many, many hours later.

I have never sugared without at least one overnighter, and sometimes two. A large operation boils sap for weeks without stopping, just drawing off the syrup as it forms, if the run is steady and copious.

It was a picture of Helen Nearing driving a team of horses through the woods standing on a sleigh loaded with buckets of maple sap that made me long for a homestead where I could lead The Simple Life, like her. Two years later, I had my own “sugar bush” (an acre or more of woodlot where large sugar maples grow). Spring equinox found me with my drill in hand, a pocket full of taps, and a bunch of funny buckets with lids to hang from the taps. “Ting, ting,” the ping of sap filling the metal buckets echoes, tying me through time to every woman who has ever sugared, and bringing a smile to my heart and face.

My groves of sugar maples have never been large enough to require a team of horses or a sleigh. I’ve always lugged a big bucket out to the trees and poured the sap from the collecting buckets into it. When I have two or three buckets full, I pour them into a big galvanized tub set up on cinder blocks over a fire and commence to boil it down.