Fast Approaching

    

Good Friday is fast approaching.  Now, this is not a religious point of view or ramble of any sorts.  But when I was little, Good Friday meant  some important things.  There was going to be a couple short weeks of school.  Our family was soon to get together with extended family for an Easter Feast.  The trout season was getting closer and it was time to gather night crawlers and dig red worms for bait.   Most importantly it meant helping make maple syrup.

For you city slickers out there, Mrs. Butterworth’s  or Log Cabin may seem fine enough on top of your pancakes, waffles, or French toast.  But I assure you…tasting true homemade maple syrup is in a class all by itself. 

You can buy it in local groceries and small shops now.  The Plum City Bank use to have some for sale, as did the Bitter Sweet Bakery.  For the small price sacrificing your first-born child, or taking out a second mortgage, you could probably afford a few gallons to last the whole year for you and the rest of the family.  (The good stuff is not cheap!)

Ah, but the joy of tapping trees, collecting the sap, cutting the wood to stoke the fires that would reduce down one of natures pure pleasures!  You haven’t truly had real maple syrup until you have taken part in the time-tested rituals that surround its existence. 

Have you struggled on a steep, snow covered, north-facing side hill, to drill the maples and insert the taps?  Have you ran your hands along the miles plastic tubing, checking for red and gray squirrel nibbles, to be sure that once the clear sugar starts dripping it goes to collecting tanks and not on the forest floor?  Better yet, have you toiled with metal 5 gallon buckets, one over each arm, trying to not lose your boots in shin deep mud, before getting back to a horse drawn wagon?

Have you been a spectator to a game of 3 handed pinochle, played by fathers, uncles, or grandpas, while the sap boiled, waiting patiently to turn that correct color of amber? 

 It’s been nearly three decades since I was in the middle of all those things.  However, a couple spoonfuls of the ‘good stuff’ on vanilla ice cream, or a heated drizzle’s worth covering a square of mom’s homemade cornbread, and I am back on that side hill. 

The smell of wood smoke lingers.  There is a hound asleep inside the cabin door. Plum Creek gurgles below, as the crew gathers to shed long sleeved flannels and welcome the warming March sun to young boy’s heaven on earth. The only thing sweeter than the syrup itself, are the memories I carry with me.

--TGI