plink

none of which I could afford. But tucked away in the back they had oldfashioned spiles, which hardly anyone wants anymore. I got a whole box for seventyfive cents each. Sugaring has changed over the years. Gone are the days of emptying buckets and sledging barrels of sap through the snowy woods. In many sugaring operations, plastic tubing runs right from the trees to the sugar house. But there are still purists out there who cherish the plink of sap into a metal bucket, and that requires a spile. One end is formed into a tube like a drinking straw, which you tap into a hole drilled in the tree. The tube then opens into a trough about four inches long. And at the base there is a handy hook on which to hang the bucket. I bought a big clean garbage can to store the sap and we were ready. I didn’t think we’d need all that storage space, but better to be prepared. In a climate where winter lasts six months, we always search assiduously for signs of spring, but never more eagerly than after we decided to make syrup. The girls ask every day, “Can we start yet?” But our beginning was entirely determined by the season. For the sap to run you need a combination of warm days and freezing nights. Warm is a relative term, of course, thirty-five to forty-two degrees, so that the sun thaws the trunk and starts the flow of sap inside. We watch the calendar and the thermometer, and Larkin asks, “How do the trees know it’s time if they can’t see the thermometer?” Indeed, how does a being without eyes or nose or nerves of any kind know what to do and when to do it? There are not even leaves out to detect the sun; every bit of the tree, except the buds, is swathed in thick, dead bark. And yet the trees are not fooled by a midwinter thaw. The fact is, Maples have a far more sophisticated system for detecting spring than we do. There are photosensors by the hundreds in every single bud, packed with light-absorbing pigments called phytochromes. Their job is to take the measure of light every day. Tightly furled, covered in red-brown scales, each bud holds an embryonic copy of a maple branch, and each bud wants desperately to someday be a full-fledged branch, leaves rustling in the wind and soaking up sun. But if the buds come out too soon they’ll be killed by freezing. Too late and they’ll miss the spring. So the buds keep the calendar. But those baby buds need energy for their growth into branches—like all newborns, they are hungry. We who lack such sophisticated sensors look for other signs. When hollows appear in the snow around the tree bases, I start to think it’s tapping time. The dark bark absorbs the growing heat of the sun and then radiates it back to slowly melt the snow that has lain there all winter. When those circles of bare ground appear, that’s when the first drops of sap will plop onto your head from a broken branch in the canopy. And so with drill in hand we circle our trees searching out just the right spot, three feet up, on a smooth face. Lo and behold, there are scars of past taps long healed over, made by whoever had left those sap buckets in our loft. We don’t know their names or their faces, but our fingers rest right where theirs had been and we know what they too were doing one morning in April long ago. And we know what they had on their pancakes. Our stories are linked in this run of sap; our trees knew them as they know us today. The spiles begin to drip almost as soon as we tap them into place. The first drops splat onto the bottom of the bucket. The girls slide the tented covers on, which makes the sound echo even more. Trees of this diameter could accept six taps without damage, but we don’t want to be greedy and only place three. By the time we’re done setting them up, the first bucket is already singing a different tune, the plink of another drop into the half inch of sap. All day long they change pitch as the buckets fill, like water glasses of different pitch. Plink, ploink, plonk— the tin buckets and their tented tops reverberate with every drop and the yard is singing. This is spring music as surely as the cardinal’s insistent whistle. My girls watch in fascination. Each drop is as clear as water but somehow thicker, catching the light and hanging for a second at the end of the spile, growing invitingly into a larger and larger drop. The girls stretch out their tongues and slurp with a look of bliss, and unaccountably I am moved to tears. It reminds me of when I alone fed them. Now, on sturdy young legs, they are nursed by a maple —as close as they can come to being suckled by Mother Earth. All day long the buckets fill and by evening they are brimming. The girls and I haul all twenty-one to the big garbage can and pour until it is almost full. I had no idea there would be so much. The girls rehang the buckets while I build the fire. Our evaporator is just my old canning kettle, set on an oven rack, spanning stacks of cinder blocks scavenged from the barn. It takes a long time to heat up a kettle of sap and the girls lose interest pretty quickly. I am in and out of the house, keeping fires going in both places. When I tuck them into bed that night, they are full of anticipation of syrup by morning. I set up a lawn chair on the packed-down snow next to the fire, feeding it constantly to keep up a good boil in the now-freezing night. Steam billows from the pot, covering and uncovering the moon in the dry, cold sky. I taste the sap as it boils down, and with every passing hour it is discernibly sweeter, but the yield from this four-gallon kettle will be nothing more than a skin of syrup on the bottom of the pan, scarcely enough for one pancake. So as it boils down I add more fresh sap from the garbage can, hoping to have just one cup of syrup by morning. I add wood, then wrap myself back in blankets, dozing until I can add more logs or sap. I don’t know what time I woke, but I was cold and stiff in my lawn chair, and the fire was burnt to embers, leaving the sap lukewarm. Beaten, I went inside to bed. When I returned in the morning, I found the sap in the garbage can frozen hard. As I got the fire going again, I remembered something I had heard about how our ancestors made maple sugar. The ice on the surface was pure water, so I cracked it and threw it on the ground like a broken window. People of the Maple Nation made sugar long before they possessed trade kettles for boiling. Instead, they collected sap in birch bark pails and poured it into log troughs hollowed from basswood trees. The large surface area and shallow depth of the troughs was ideal for ice formation. Every morning, ice was removed, leaving a more concentrated sugar solution behind. The concentrated solution could then be boiled to sugar with far less energy required. The freezing nights did the work of many cords of firewood, a reminder of elegant connections: maple sap runs at the one time of year when this method is possible. Wooden evaporating dishes were placed on flat stones over the coals of a fire that burned night and day.