These are the days that make me wish I were 10 again. When I was 10, or anywhere around that age, these sunny, spring days would be spent running home from the one-room country school as fast as my legs could carry me.
My brother and I would slam into the house through the kitchen, and up the stairs to our bedrooms, to change into our old clothes. The school books and lunch pails would be cast aside in our hurry to get out into the woods to collect the sap pails from the maple trees.
Pa would be waiting for us with his tractor and a wagon loaded with empty milk cans. As he followed the trail through the woods, we would helter skelter run and grab the 2-quart pails hanging from the taps and dump them into larger pails. When the larger pails were as full as we could carry them, my brother and I would take them to the wagon to empty them into the milk cans.
Eventually, all the pails would be emptied. Sometimes I would put my face down by the tap to catch a few sweet drops of the sap. Not too sweet, but just enough for a taste of the syrup that was to come.
When the collecting was complete, we would haul the load to the flat pan in an open area of the woods. The cans were emptied into this pan. The pan sat on a rim of rocks on three sides, with the open side being where Pa would feed in wood to cook the sap down into syrup.
For me, it was a glorious time of year. It seemed the earth was coming awake after the long winter slumber. Birds were singing, the air was fresh and things like ice, melting snow and mud never bothered me. Collecting sap is one of my best childhood memories.
For Pa, it was work, but I believe he took great pleasure in that work. He was the one who had to deal with firing up that fire in all hours of the day and night. He had to deal with the times it would rain, diluting the sap in the pails and the syrup in the pan. If I recall correctly, we just dumped out the pails if it had rained a lot.
For Ma, it was work, but she was never one to shirk work. It was her job to finish the cooking process in the house. It had to be cooked down more, and she would put an egg in it. I believe it was to help clean it up. Then it had to be strained. All of this meant the never ending housework got to be more. Now add syrupy stickiness to it all.
To my family, the end product was well worth the effort: real maple syrup for our pancakes or just slathered on a slice of homemade bread. Plus, we always had more than we would ever use, so it was given away as gifts to family and friends alike.
Once maple sugar season was finished, we had to wash up all those sap pails, milk cans and the like. Now when I think of it, I know it was a lot of work, but it didn’t seem like it at the time.
It doesn’t take much imagining to bring me back to a 10-year-old, running through the woods or smelling the sweet smell of sap cooking down into syrup.
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