Remains of the Daze: 2012

     When I was a child, the last days of February and beginning of March were a very special time of year. Not because of Spring Break, but because those were the days that winter began to wane and the sap would begin to run from those grand Maple trees. My father-Jack of all trades and his brother, Bill made Maple syrup in a small shack in my uncle's woods along with the help of my mother, Lois and Aunt Joyce, my brother, Bob and I and their six children. It was a little shack built in the woods, with a barely marked laneway, hardly noticable from the road but it held a special place in my heart and still does.

     Our Spring Break would be filled with days of playing in the woods by the shack, carrying buckets of sap to a now defunct manure spreader filled with 45 gallon drums in which to collect the sap and transport it back to the shack. Oh the fun, the escapades shared with cousins and the memories.
Firstly, being not very well off, we wore rubber boots with bread bags inside to guard against leaks and various items of outdoor clothing that had been passed down through the ranks of the cousins-mismatched mitts and coats that were made for the opposite sex. The older cousins ran from tree to tree tipping pails of sap from their hooks and spile to spill into waiting buckets and then running them off to be dumped at the waiting manure spreader. Only the older children who could drive the tractor carefully without jerking and therefore spilling, were allowed to, but here was where I eventually drove a tractor starting at age eleven-when I had to sit on the transfer case to reach the clutch pedal! The younger cousins were not usually required to carry pails but tagged along running behind, stumbling and tripping through the woods and looking for all the little harbringers of spring, picking wild flowers that had begun to appear and collecting useful sticks and other organic parapharnelia. My most favourite thing to do was to pull the sap pail from it's wire hook on the spile and tip it back and guzzle the slightly sweet distilled water, cold and running down my chin and quenching my thirst! In fact, as we walked down our country road recently and passed by my neighbour's taps, I waited until out of sight of their house and threw myself into the ditch, pulled the lines from their 2 gal water containers and tipped it up to pour the sap down my throat. My children stared at me aghast! What are you doing, Mom? Just having a taste of spring, children! As I wiped the residual sap from my face with a smile!
     The main taps were in the bush but we also tapped some trees along the road. I can still remember the frost coming out of the gravel road-the top would be mucky, watery and jiggle when you stepped on it. I can still see my rubber-booted feet with Wonder bread plastic protruding from the tops, lightly jiggling up and down on the surface; mucky but still in a solid mass that could carry your weight. And then of course there were the moments when your boots found a hole of grey slop and sank and you had to be pulled out, your boots making a sucking noise as they were slowly extracted from the muck! Oh the incredible freedom and lightness of being as we traversed the roads, the sun weakly shining through the last of winter's sky, the hope of spring in every bud, the promise of summer in every gleam of green and lush verdant spread of new moss!
     The shack itself was probably 15' x 120' and open at one side that faced Southwest. At the back was a huge hand-built chimney that also contained a square brick oven with a steel door on the side, over which sat a large black cast iron pot-possibly 3' in diameter and which held the initial offerings of the watery-sweet sap. Here the sap steamed away its surplus of water until it was ready to be dumped into the 8' finishing pan which sat on a longer brick oven with a door on the oppsosite end of it and faced the open end of the shack. On the North side of the shack there was a bench built of simple sawn lumber on which we children would perch and watch the steam roll off the pans. On the opposite side of the shack, the wall was half open at the bottom and there was a stand on which to hold another 8' pan if the sap was running at peak and there was extra collected. The outside of the shack was completely covered in roofing steel and non-descript with its patches of rust and curling edges but in my mind it was a Holy place-a veritable Cathedral built in the woods. On school days, our local schools would make a field trip of it and visit and I remember feeling threatened as all the children invaded my space, as if I had to share something which I wanted to keep a secret-all mine to keep.
     On Saturday and Sunday mornings, often my father and uncle would have spend the night watching the pans and my mother and aunt would pile us into Aunt and Uncle's station wagon and bring us to enjoy breakfast of bacon and eggs cooked over the fire. It seemed quite normal then, but when I think of it now...how much work that must have been to cook all that food for such a crowd of children and adults. And then of course there were often pancakes to be had when the sap had been reduced to it's sticky sweet remnants of syrup. My dad and uncle would watch like hawks, checking often with a candy thermometer and carefully skimming the foam that rose to the top and any flakes of ash that invariably found their way to sail accross the dark surface of the pan. I can remember at least one occasion when my mother and aunt were left to 'finish' the pan, as there were chores to be done at home-cows, pigs and chickens to be fed and a cow to be milked at my cousin's farm. Lois and Joyce cooked the syrup past the syrup stage into toffee and although my father and uncle were very upset, we could hardly contain our glee as we scooped spoonfuls of the stuff and ran out and drizzled it onto handfuls of snow to eat as it hardened into candy! When the syrup was finished to it's proper percentage of sugar, then it was carefully poured into 5 gallon cream cans and brought home where my mother would reheat it in batches, strain it and pour it into hot, sterilized canning jars. Many gallons were sold but we would have syrup for the year, waiting for us when we came home from school, to be poured into a bowl and sopped up with buttery pieces of toast. A tradtion that I shared with my children and is still carried on by one of my daughters. The syrup that we made was more of an amber grade than the thin light stuff that you can purchase in the store these days; I still prefer the darker, less desirable B grade.
     After the collecting was done, the necessary stacks of wood to feed the fires piled by the side of the shack and the kindling split (all chores to be done by us children) then there was time for play: the collecting of wildflowers, the building of forts, alliances to be won between girls and boys (there were only two boys, my brother: oldest and 4 years my senior and my cousin one year my junior) and battles to be fought! This was where I first broke my tail bone. The boys had built a fort and the girls were not allowed. I went in anyway and my brother dragged me out, picked me up and dropped me on a tiny stump. I cried and barely could walk for weeks but my parents didn't take me to a doctor-those were different days when doctors cost money and you were expected to suck it up! It was a sad day when the night temperatures would rise above zero and the buds would begin to pop and the sap turned a yellow colour-it was all over for another season.
     As we grew older, my uncle left off making syrup and my family carried on the tradition alone. The manure spreader was retired and replaced by a rusty coloured 1950 something Pontiac Strato Chief that had a trunk large enough to hold a casket or two barrels of sap or 6 of your closest friends when getting into the drive-in. It had a manual transmission and I learned how to drive on that baby with it's winged fenders when I was around 12-the trick was to learn how to let out the clutch slowly enough not to spill the sap, yet fast enough to not burn it out....oh the days of youth! We didn't collect in the bush anymore; my father tapped father afield down side roads and along neighbour's laneways that were lined with Maples. He had a drill bit mounted to a chainsaw and could quickly tap a few holes in each tree as us kids (now teens) and my mother followed along with stacks of pails, a pocket full of pink hormone pills which were inserted into the freshly drilled holes and which kept the taps open (who knows what they contained?) and wooden fruit baskets of spiles to pound in and hang the pails on. It's a standing joke in our family that my dad once tapped a Red Oak on the long laneway at my Grandparent's old farm at Big Bend near Wardsville. He just walked along a row of trees and in the rythym of drilling the taps forgot to look up at the tree. Needless to say, it wasn't a very productive tree!
     These days I try to bring my kids to a syrup farm every year, but this year-2012-during the winter that never was and as sap ran weeks early in February, I didn't go. That doesn't mean that I didn't enjoy the season and look longingly and lustfully at my neighbour's sap containers this year and receive with enthusiasm the bottle of syrup they sent home with my kids. I wish that I could transport my children back 40 years when there was no X-box or Social Media but alas we shall live vicariously through the local Sugar Farm and buy our syrup at the store, sadly thin and pale but still sweet!