One frosty March night I stood in the doorway of the sugarhouse and watched the steam rise from the boiling sap. Like a ghost, illuminated by the glow of the late winter moon, it rose, danced and vanished into the night sky.
I looked north, over the silhouette of the barn, the sleeping barn, the animals fed and bedded for the night. In the sky I saw a multitude of stars, as far as I could see. Some were peeking through the pine grove at the back of the pasture. Some stars were bright in the cold night sky, and some were so faint I wasn't sure they were there at all. One set of stars stood bold and familiar, high in the speckled sky.
Since the earliest years of my life I remember the nightly walk that I shared with my Father, back from the barn, up the worn path across the lawn and into the comfort of the old farm house.
Every cloudless night we would stand, looking up with the hope of catching a glimpse of a shooting star. Father would point to the Big Dipper and trace its shape with his finger. The bent handle, the cup, pointing the way to the North Star. "The North Star never moves", he would say. I learned early that our northern sky rotates on the North Star, guiding the hunter, the fisherman and the explorer alike. The North Star begins the handle for the little dipper, the other vessel gracing our northern sky.
But this March night something was different. The Big Dipper hung high in the heavens, tipped, pouring its contents onto the countryside below. I imagined the Big Dipper draining its sweet hold down into the dark forest. The oaks and ash were still sleeping, waiting for the coming season of growth, their buds tucked tightly away, their roots dormant, their trunks cold and hard. The pines and hemlocks were bunched so closely together not even the March moon could pierce their darkness.
Some special trees in the woods were awake, looking skyward, longing for the warming days to come. These were the maples. Sugar, red and white, all different, but the same. Their limbs reaching toward the Big Dipper, catching the sweetness it offered. The sugar maples with their long limbs and spreading crown could catch the sweetest nectar and store it for the days to come. The reds and white were left to catch what the sugar maple had missed. Happy with what they had received, the maple trees would need to share their bounty.
Long before the white man set his sights on this new world, the native man had found the spring sweetness of the maples. At first just as a treat, the sugar in the maples soon became a tradition marking the changing of the seasons, from the slumber of winter to the rebirth of spring. Through the generations the natives and pioneers alike would notch the maples in the last days of winter and catch the sweet sap.
On our farm, for generations we have tapped the maples, to save this glimpse of sweetness. Collected by the children and carried to the kitchen, every pot and pan would be employed to hold and boil the sap away.
The limbwood stored in the woodshed would run a hot fire in the old cookstove to chase the water up and out the windows. At last, after days of adding wood and sap the maple syrup would remain. Carefully the thick syrup would be poured hot into a glass jar, cover tightened and stored on the shelf in the cellar stairway.
I know the pride that a child feels when, on a cold night in the fall, his mother asks him to fetch a jar of maple syrup. At that moment, as he reaches for the jar, he remembers it all. The walk through the deep snow to each tree, the old bit stock drill, the cast iron tap, the galvanized bucket and cover. He remembers the excitement of each visit to the biggest sugar maple. The buckets, nearly overflowing, waiting through the cold night only to begin again tomorrow, one drip at a time. Yes, there is much work to make even a cup of maple syrup, but like those before, the boy knows it is worth it.
That boy has grown now and has children of his own. The family farm remains intact, from the pine grove, the barn, the old house with the cookstove and the sugar maples. Hiding deep in the weathered trunk is the evidence of generations past, one tap at a time. Looking over it all, the Big Dipper tips slowly each late winter night and pours its sweetness onto the outstretched maples below.
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