The Letdown
Alone in the evaporator room at 5pm – the green hose snaked across the cement floor that cools her feet, a dish rag draped over the counter, the rag laden with six screw-and-nut ensembles resembling barbells, four more nuts in a line, and two rows of four washers each, the woodshed doors both shut and the floor in front of them swept bare – she sits on the wooden deck last scrubbed two days ago during end-of-boil chore time. Across from her the syrup box appears a duller red than on boiling days since the lights that illuminate the syrup pans are turned off so she isn’t able to read the list of Maple Syrup Flavors compiled by the crew over the years, including Burnt Toast, Foxy, Righteous and the new one, Techie Toffee, added just this past Sunday. She rises, turns on the boom box on the shelf above the counter to high volume, sits again and listens to The Cottars (a Cape Breton group) sing.
Her soprano voice lilts,
His tenor harmony sways,
A guitar carries.
…As sun will melt the snow
on clear, bright April mornings,
Tu-ra-lu-ra-lu,
Tu-ra-lu-ra-lye…
No more RO groan,
No more roar of the fire,
No banter to mask the yearning.
-AC
The Nebraska Knoll Blog 
A temporary suspension of an industrial facility operation, an interregnum, looking to the future and to the anticipated recurrence next season of production and of nature’s vicissitudes …
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Sugar season has a beginning, a middle, and an end, and then a beginning… AC
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Such a mix of observations and emotions. I felt like I was right there with you, except if I had been that would’ve changed what you wrote which could have been a statement about the end of a loved one’s life. Thanks, as always, Audrey. Here’s to you, Lew,, your ream, and a grand tour of Tuckerman!
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You’re welcome, Nina. As always, I appreciate your careful reading and your encouragement. A-
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The art of sugar-making and the waves of feel-good that wash over one, after sustained energy arrays its consequence. The sweet, the music, the bird song that pierces the silence.
“It’s a roller coaster of euphoria and utter discouragement, I think, but I just can’t seem to give it up.” Lew
And another graph for the wall.
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Elyse, I wish I could recall more details about your boiling setup. I was trying to describe it to someone recently. It was charming and innovative. After school Freedle chose to boil with you in mellow bliss rather than in our noisy, crisis-bedeviled evaporator room. Your words are apt and ring true, regardless the scale of the sugar-making adventure. Thanks for writing. AC
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Somewhere (can’t remember where now) we found some corrugated galvanized aluminum sheets for a primitive roof over an equally primitive 4-5″-diameter hemlock frame that defined a 6 x 8′ area for our “arch” – a cinder block fire pit. There was some metal structure within the pit that supported a 5-gallon copper wash-tub boiling pan & a small sap “preheater”. I think I had found some sort of antique bunsen burner stand that we used to support a 1-gallon (or maybe 1/2) baking powder tin, into which a hole was punched, near the bottom, used to introduce preheated sap to the copper tub (so as not to lose the boil)
We finished the sweet for not more than an hour in the kitchen…
I still think sbout that little outdoor sugarhouse and the boys collecting sap into a 40-qt Gott cooler mounted on Lew’s old sled around the 20 or so very sweet old “Excelsior” trees between our driveway and the Brook. The Coty & M-C boys had many fine days boiling there…
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I think we used additional cinder blocks to support the boiler — and though I’ve looked for another forged iron “sap-tin stand” (sap probably warmed in a blue and white spatter canning pot or possibly a sap bucket near the edge of the fire), that bunsen burner stand may have been an older and rarer item than I knew at the time. Pretty sure I let it go in some tag sale…it was a beauty. Have not found one like it since. I don’t think we ever made more than 2 gallons there — but it was a labor of love, for certain.
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Somewhere (can’t remember where now) we found some corrugated galvanized aluminum sheets for a primitive roof over an equally primitive 4-5″-diameter hemlock frame that defined a 6 x 8′ area for our “arch” – a cinder block fire pit. There was some metal structure within the pit that supported a 5-gallon copper wash-tub boiling pan & a small sap “preheater”. I think I had found some sort of antique bunsen burner stand that we used to support a 1-gallon (or maybe 1/2) baking powder tin, into which a hole was punched, near the bottom, used to introduce preheated sap to the copper tub (so as not to lose the boil)
We finished the sweet for not more than an hour in the kitchen…
I still think sbout that little outdoor sugarhouse and the boys collecting sap into a 40-qt Gott cooler mounted on Lew’s old sled around the 20 or so very sweet old “Excelsior” trees between our driveway and the Brook. The Coty & M-C boys had many fine days boiling there…
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