Sugar on Snow

This morning at breakfast, I drizzled some maple syrup on my porridge. This time of year, as the frost begins to loosen in the ground and the ice on the pond is covered with a thin film of pooled water, I can feel the sap running in the woodlands of North America. So too, in my soul.

When the sap runs, the earth is approaching the vernal equinox. Daylight is becoming longer, yet the nights are still below freezing temperatures. The earth is softening and it becomes mud season.

Drip, drip, drip, the sweet water flows down through the trees. I sense it within me too. Somewhere, maple trees have been tapped with sap spouts. The tin buckets used for centuries to carry the sweet water to the tanks may have been replaced with plastic tubing; the wood stoves used to heat the evaporators may have been modernized as well; I do not know. Nevertheless, I have no doubt that the steam rising from boiling sap will infuse the winter breeze with the aroma of maple syrup. The tree sap is best when the hillsides are still covered in a thick blanket of wet snow. The bird songs have changed to establish territory for new homes. I listen for the chickadee outside my window, as it now sings the tune of “Sweet spring.”

One of my favorite possessions is a slice of a maple tree, cut from my uncle’s sugar orchard in Nova Scotia. It was a horizontal cut. One side is still rough from the saw that was used to sever the tree. The other side, my father sanded and then shellacked to enhance the rings within the outer bark. As a child, I often sat and counted each concentric circle that recorded the number of years of life for this particular tree. The innermost rings are smaller and difficult to count. Then as the rings expand out, the first scar marks show where the holes were drilled to extract the sap. The scars reach deep inward through several years of growth in my slice of maple tree, but they never enter the core.

My uncle felled many trees to light the fires in his sugar camp. He began setting aside wood in the summertime so that it would dry and be right for keeping the fires burning long and hot.

It takes a lot of tree sap to make syrup, about four times the amount of sap for each bottle of syrup. The trees will have held onto more sap following a winter that has been consistently cold. And the sap will be sweeter in the years when there has been a hard winter.

Like the sweetness in life, the sap supply is dependent on several factors. The age of the trees; the hardship of a cold weather; a thick blanket of snow covering on the ground; nights below freezing with warm sunny days; and, hard labor all produce more sweetness to be collected.

As I ate my breakfast cereal this morning, I mused about all of this. And, I remembered the taste of sugar on snow. Spring is on the way.