Half Cent Maple Sugaring

Most of the manses where we lived had huge maple trees in the yard or nearby. They sport such colorful red and yellow leaves in the fall. Every year, Dad would mark the trees he thought would provide abundant sap. He would wander about muttering (Dad always muttered to himself no matter what he was doing, a sort of running conversation of what was going through his head), making measurement of tree girth, thumping on the trunk.

Then we would wait for January thaw. Sometime in January, the temperatures always rose above freezing for a few days, and Dad would go out and put his spigots and buckets in place. He used a nail and pounded it into the trunk of the maple tree, the inserted a metal spout in the hole, wriggling it about until it was solidly in place. From this spigot, he hung a pail, then generally covered it with something to keep the rain and bugs out.

Watery sap would run out of the spigot and into the pail, and Dad would check the pail from time to time to see how full it was getting. He dumped all the sap he collected through a piece of cheesecloth to strain out the impurities and into a big container in the garage. He kept this up until the sap had run its course and he had collected gallons and gallons and gallons of what looked like water.

Then he would boil the watery sap (which was sweet to the taste but not sticky or gooey) for hours and hours and hours over a very low heat, sometimes out of doors over a wood fire, sometimes if the weather was unfriendly, in the kitchen over the cook stove. The steam was suffocating and the smell of sweetness overwhelming. I hated this part of the process, but I knew what was coming, so I just kept my distance until it was over.

Days (yes, it took days) later, we would have a couple of quarts of thin maple syrup that tasted wonderful on pancakes. If we were really lucky and there was a clean snowfall, Dad would make jack wax. He would pack fresh soft snow into a cake pan, then pour hot boiling syrup over it. It hardened into a thick sticky sweet taffy like candy that we kids loved.

What a welcomed reprieve from the rigors of winter, a small break in the dreary snow and cold and ice, a ray of sweetness in a gray winter world.