Count the Pails

For a while, the pail resting here on the plank stores sap for brewing coffee with.
This pail, or bucket, hangs from a maple tree named Maggie. Sap drips into it; it holds sap.
This other pail is for collecting sap from the bucket and lugging it to the sap tank.

A green hose for rinsing sap vessels curls out of the pump room pail.
Filtering cloths slimy with sap slump for a while in the bottom of the RO room pail.
Yellow, blue, and turquoise rubber gloves flop in this other pail.

The white pail on the floor here near the evaporator collects drops of hot distilled water.
After a while someone lifts it to the side and covers it with a lid.
Those three other white pails are next up. Two of them have wooden handles made by Chops.

Draped with cleaning rags, some for the floor and others for surfaces, is a silver pail.
To clean things, once in a while someone scoops the hot water from a white pail into the silver pail.
To collect syrup drips from the syrup tank nozzle sits a sticky silver pail.

The syrup pail is empty – but only for a little while.

—JG and AC