This weekend I pruned our fruit trees.

There were three ancient apple trees in the yard of my childhood home. These trees consistently gave great apples without much maintenance. What I didn’t understand at the time was that the pruning for such productivity had been done decades before we moved to the house. All we did was give the trees a haircut each spring, pruning off the new shoots. These shoots are the branches that go straight up from the main branches. They were easy for us to recognize and prune out because they were straight and had darker bark than other branches. We rarely had to think about the structure of the tree or correct any problems. A wise pruner had done that for us a long time before.

Our bountiful apples and easy pruning led me to greatly underestimate the complexities, as well as the joys, of starting my own orchard.

But that is exactly what I did. Soon after we broke ground to build our house in 1987, I went out and got myself a gaggle of apple and pear trees.

When I taught English to high school students in the 1980’s, I would give them an unidentified list of apple varieties. If they could tell me what the list described, I would give them an extra 100 quiz score to boost their grade point average. They could research this list any way they wanted, but few figured it out. In this age of Google, probably everyone would solve the puzzle, but back then it was an obscure, mysterious list.

I loved giving this list to my students, It was poetry. It was history. It was the realm of nature and human imagination meeting. I was just as in love with the names of the apples as the apples themselves.

Winter Banana, Baldwin, Northern Spy, Yellow Transparent, Spartan, D’Arcy Spice, Chiver’s Delight, Howgate Wonder, Gravenstein, Westfield Seek no Further, Ashmead’s Kernel, Cox’s Orange Pippin, Grimes Golden, Chenango Strawberry, Sheepnose, Black Twig, Spitzenburg, Wolf River, Summer Rambo, Duchess of Oldenburg, Red Astrachan, Peasgood Nonsuch.

My love for the names caused a beautiful mistake. There were so many apple trees with magic names to love and embrace, I didn’t ask the Angels for advice about what varieties of trees to plant. Instead, I went ahead and ordered eight different apple trees bearing marvelous names and three different pears.

This worked fine with the Pear trees. The three I planted happened to happily cross pollinate. Most years, we have a good crop of pears. The apples have been a different story.

Apple trees are like pears in their need for cross pollination. They will not set a good crop with their own pollen. This means an apple tree should not be planted singly but needs a partner as pollinator. Different kinds of apple trees may seem to bloom at the same time, but they actually bloom across a three week period with blooms being available for pollination only a short number of days in this period. The cross pollinator one chooses must bloom at the exact same time. I chose apple trees that don’t bloom at the same time. Eight lone rangers.

Another issue in pollination is proximity. One would think that all the wild apples in our hedgerow and in the cultivated apples next door at Teddy’s would provide a cross pollinator or two for our eight, but even if there is a match, it doesn’t help. There is a limit to how far a bee will travel on its pollen and nectar seeking forays before it returns to the hive. Therefore the cross pollinators need to be close together. Trees at Teddy’s don’t solve our cross pollination problems as they are well outside the rough guide of no more than sixty feet between cross pollinators.

I put these eleven trees in a ring around one of the vegetable gardens. The reason there are not a symmetrical twelve trees is that the granite ledge beneath our property is so close to the surface where these trees were planted that the place for the twelfth tree was bare ledge. The other trees don’t have much more soil. I would say that the most any tree was planted in was a foot of soil. I improved what soil there was with compost and various other organic soil amendments, but really, these are valiant trees to have grown in this spot.

Not only did these beloveds have a difficult environment in which to flourish, but I didn’t understand how much radical pruning I needed to do during the first years of their lives here. I thought that fruit trees naturally branched out, whereas I was to learn that most branches naturally go up. They need to be pruned to go out. They need to be pruned to have an organized set of branches.

One reason for pruning them outwards into organized layers of branches is because the fruit needs light to ripen. If the branches are all close together going skyward, the fruit doesn’t get much sunlight. By encouraging the tree to branch outward, more fruit can get sunlight. Beyond this technical reason, apple trees also have incredible elegance when they have been well pruned. Pruning brings out their inherent beauty.

I have learned much about gardening from watching other gardeners. I had the great good fortune to watch and learn from a wonderful pruner. After our small orchard had meandered along in my confused care for several years, a master pruner named Lauren Sherman arrived to give me a much needed inservice. She also did some much needed remedial work on all our fruit trees. By the time she arrived, I had added plums, peaches, more pears, and a sour cherry to our small orchard, but I was listening better to the Angels and knew enough to get cross pollinators for the plums. The cherries and peaches are self pollinating so it was okay for me to get a solitary cherry and four of the same peach variety. Lauren worked her way around the whole collection. I followed, watching her every cut.

Lauren in action was a joy to behold. An hour in Lauren’s hands and a scraggly tree would reveal its beautiful bones. Lauren explained an obvious point. A tree’s branches must be within reach either from the ground or from a ladder or no one can harvest its fruit. She taught me how to properly take off the top of the tree so every branch is accessible. I also learned how to cut out crossing branches and branches growing inward, and how to cut a branch right above an outward facing bud to encourage outward growth. Over the years these techniques have transformed our trees. That and a lot of standing around asking the trees’ advice and asking myself WWLD (What Would Lauren Do)?

Before Lauren, I was a timid pruner. Originally the seven acre field where we set our house had no trees in it. Our hedgerow and lower acres had trees, but every other tree is here because we planted it. Given this paucity of trees, it was initially very hard for me to part with a single branch, let alone take off hundreds of branches. I also was afraid any bold action on my part would hurt the trees. I didn’t really understand the necessity of extensive, even radical, pruning until Lauren. I hadn’t really understood until then that the reason why my childhood apple trees did so well was because some human had forced them into a shape that would work for fruit production. It hadn’t just happened all on its own.

A garden isn’t something that plants create alone. A garden is a meeting place where plants cross pollinate with the imagination, purposes, and actions of people. Apple names reflect this. A name like Westfield Seek no Further tells a story of a good cross pollination between nature and humans in an orchard somewhere, maybe Westfield. A fruit tree will be one thing if left to run wild and another thing entirely if hybridized by a knowledgeable arborist, grown with love, and pruned by a wise pruner. This kind of cross pollination results in a situation where one would need to seek no further for a good apple.

But also, a garden has its own identity, separate from the plants and the humans, beyond the hopes and limitations of the humans and the plants. A gardener in alignment with the garden in her care will cut away everything that inhibits the expression of the garden’s essence, but also surrender to the great mystery that a garden has a destiny separate from its people or its plants.

The longer I am here at Green Hope Farm, the more certain I am that this place’s identity and purposes exist well beyond its present form or my work here. This is exhilarating and also humbling.

Good cross pollination between humans and nature is theoretically going to serve the greater identity of the garden. But maybe sometimes a breakdown in communication, problem pollination so to speak, also serves this greater identity. Like my non bearing apple trees. The ones I no longer know the names of so I cannot give them a pollinating partner. They are beautifully pruned now, but most of them still don’t bear fruit in the conventional sense of the phrase.

In this small instance, as in everything else, my job is to try and figure out what course of action is in alignment with this consciousness Green Hope Farm. Do I cut these trees down and start over with better information so as to get a good crop of apples? That would seem the logical choice. But maybe, in this instance, I must bow to a superior wisdom that used my lack of knowledge to bring in these particular eight apple trees for energetic reasons. We certainly know Green Hope Farm has purposes beyond the obvious of food production. Perhaps I must accept that my mistakes have been as important to this place as what my personality would call my better decisions. Perhaps these eight lone rangers do bear fruit, but I can’t see it.

As I consider this, it comforts me to think of our shipping mistakes. We make them. This is not the comforting news. The comforting news is that there often seems to be gifts in our mistakes. The wrong Essence we sent often seems to bring something none of us knew was needed when you ordered. We certainly try a) not to make mistakes and b) to fix mistakes when they happen by sending the Essence you originally ordered, but we are comforted by how often you tell us the mistake was the one you needed most. Once again, this is exhilarating and also humbling.

So for some reason Green Hope Farm needs these lovely lone rangers just the way they are. And me? For as long as I can climb a ladder and hold my felco pruners, I am going to happily prune these trees to help them bear fruit, apples or no apples.

Friday I do farm jobs. This Friday, I spent most of the day starting seeds in seed flats and finishing up the syrup that I boiled down earlier in the week but didn’t get canned.

I ended up collecting about forty more gallons of Maple sap on Tuesday, so during the week, I boiled that down as well as the hundred gallons from Sunday. This morning, I canned up almost four gallons of syrup. It is not Frenchman’s Blonde. It is not even medium in color. It is really a dark amber. Usually the syrup is only this dark towards the end of the season.

I sent my husband off to school today to ask various children whose families also sugar if they also are getting such dark syrup from their sap runs. If I get a chance after sowing all the seeds, then I will go to a sugarhouse in town to ask for myself. I am trying to suss out if we are going to have an abbreviated sugaring season. No matter what happens, it’s okay for us. I will be happy even if this is the only sap we get this year, but I worry about people like my neighbors at the Taylor Brothers Sugarhouse. While they also dairy farm, a good sugaring season really makes their year. Liz Taylor used to work here back in the 90’s. Her eldest child, Jeff, is in Will’s fifth grade class. There are about a dozen Taylor Brothers Sugarhouse progeny for Jim to buttonhole at school for information, including Jeff.

I started a lot of seeds today. The Flowers for this year’s Venus Garden are mostly purple and I started two flats of those plants. Other Flowers including Osteospermum, Asters, Nicotiana, Ageratum, and Bells of Ireland were sown today too. Right now, I am doing the plants that like to be started about 8-10 weeks before our last frost. This is usually around June 1st.

I also started lots of herbs for the circular stone courtyard that leads into this building and the farmhouse. I hope to put many varieties of Thyme, Lavender, and other herbs and scented Flowers in this courtyard so everyone’s trek into the office or house is fragrant and sweet. The encircling rock wall is a bit of a heat sink. Well, that’s sort of a relative term here at the Arctic circle, but I do think the heat loving herbs will be happy in this spot. We certainly gravitate there on any even slightly warm spring day to eat our lunches and bask in the sunlight.

For the vegetable garden I started basil, parsley, leeks, tomatoes, peppers, eggplants, cauliflower, broccoli, cabbage, lettuce, and brussel sprouts. Per usual, the Angels have been playful in their selection of vegetable varieties. Among other things, we will be growing white, yellow, pink. purple, black, and red tomatoes and purple and orange cauliflower.

Like everywhere else, its St. Patrick’s Day today. I have covered my green shirt in soil mix. The last potatoes for eating are going into a New England boiled dinner tonight. All the rest of our potatoes we will plant. Our Irish cousins plant their potatoes on St. Patrick’s Day. For us, potato planting is a ways off, but not that far off. Today, up to my elbows in seed mix, I knew that, and so did the dogs, who could hardly believe I was wasting their day out of the office by being inside.

This time of year I want to share Maple Flower Essence with the entire world.

Some acquaintances don’t bear close inspection very well, but the more time I spend with Maple, up close, hands on bark, maple steam in my face, roots beneath my boots, the more I love Maple. And the more I treasure it as a Flower Essence.

Right now, I could say all the things I have said before about Maple Flower Essence in the guide. How it helps us with issues of grounding. How it helps us find a centered place from which to express our feelings. How it helps us find a balance of an outward male dynamic of action and an inward female dynamic of reflection. How it crisps up our ability to do the vital work of being ourselves in the world with integrity. These things are all abundantly true and make Maple a fabulous, fabulous healing tool. But today, I particularly want to write about Maple and its Flower Essence as supportive in the all encompassing dynamic of self care.

I can get derailed into thinking I need something from some specific person or that other people can hurt me with their actions, even when the truth of the matter is that their actions have nothing to do with me and everything to do with their own learning.

Maple lifts me out of this tug of war of I need this from YOU and nobody else but YOU. Maple reminds me the real job of being in the world as a grown up is to figure out what I need to give myself to nourish and support my essential self and then give it to myself.

I don’t mean going to a cave and cooking my own big game by myself while yelling SEE I DON’T NEED YOU. I am thinking about more of a give and take process with me recognizing I need to talk about topic A and then thinking of a friend who also likes to talk about topic A versus demanding that someone with no interest in topic A listen to me because I have made them the designated person for listening to topic A. There is no flow in that approach whereas an honest assessment of what I need, how I can get it, and where it can come from leads to flowing like the Maple sap does. I see what part of me needs attention, see the easiest way to bring the sap to that part of myself, and then I do it.

Maples are such a profound example of this dynamic. For a start, a Maple tree nourishes all parts of itself with life giving sap. This sap flows everywhere in the tree from the tip of its roots to the top most bud. That sounds obvious even corny to mention, but it is significant. Do any of us take care of all our parts so thoroughly? I have a distinct tendency to neglect figurative and literal parts of myself. A Maple tree never does this.

Maple knows its own life is its calling. I have never met a Maple who wanted to be the tree next door. Maple puts all its energy into its own journey of self expression. This isn’t to say a Maple doesn’t enjoy offering shade, food, housing, sap, wisdom, or its Flower Essence to fellow travelers on this planet. I have always experienced Maple as extremely generous in its outpouring of support. However, Maple really isn’t trying to be anything it is not. It knows it is enough. As I visit with wonderful Maple trees each day, this seems a ridiculous understatement. Maple is so much more than enough. But isn’t that a lovely piece of self care that Maple rests in this truth.

Maples embrace a seasonal dynamic that has a period of inner quiet and dormancy followed by self expression from a restored place. After dormancy, Maples return to new life in a rhythm that is responsive to the world and its weather, but also true to each individual Maple’s own inner timing, needs, and purpose. From day to day, trees next to each other, even taps adjacent to each other give different amounts of sap. I have come to see each tree as an individual expression of Maple with its own unique journey back to new life.

Some modern sugarers put a vacuum pump on their plastic tubing to pull sap out of the tree whether it wants to give this sap or not. This seems like a gross violation of a Maple tree. Each Maple knows how to regulate its return from dormancy to an outward expression of itself. Heck, each Maple tree knows we need BOTH periods of dormancy and periods of external activity. If only humanity had anywhere near the same sense of balance as a Maple tree, what a leap forward that would be in terms of planetary self care!

This time of year the local paper prints many articles on the science of Maple sugaring. Various researchers at various sugar institutes speak about why a Maple behaves as it does. Then everyone in the sugarhouses all over the northeast talk about how Maples never behave like the articles say. I love this. Maples send the sap into their branches then back to their roots in a mysterious flow that resists analysis or human control. Yup, even those vacuum pumps can’t pull sap out of a tree that isn’t flowing. This is self care with attitude and I love it!

As I hug a Maple or work with Maple Flower Essence, I am reminded of my own natural outward and inward flow, my own inner rhythms, my own sweet life force that can fill every pore of my being. This time of year when I witness Maple’s wisdom close up each and every day, is it any wonder that no matter what you ask me, the answer that flows out of my mouth is Maple? I think not!

Our Maple sugaring season has begun in earnest. Here is an overview of the process for anyone interested.

My kind of Maple sugaring is called backyard sugaring by locals. One way to describe backyard sugaring is that it is small scale sugaring on a shoestring. Many who practice the art of backyard sugaring especially enjoy improvising equipment from other farm and household stuff like old coffee cans. I have even seen a sap holding tank set on top of an old outhouse toilet. This gave me pause, but for others it was probably a splendid innovation.

I like a sugaring set up that has a bit of beauty to it as well as Yankee ingenuity. To this end, I was lucky enough to start our tiny operation with long time Green Hope Farm neighbor Teddy Grobe’s beautiful sugaring buckets. She saved them when she sold her farm in the late 1970’s. Our first year sugaring at Green Hope Farm, we borrowed a boiling pan from another friend. We found after our first boil, that it was too small.

Fortunately there is a wonderful local craftsman who makes lead free boiling pans for small sugaring operations. His pans are available at the famous general store in Norwich, VT called ‘Dan and Whit’s’. Its slogan is “If we don’t have it, you don’t need it” and quite frankly, this is true. During sugaring season, Dan & Whit’s fills a space in its back warehouse with sugaring supplies including buckets, taps, hydrometers, felts, boiling pans, and containers to put up the syrup. There are always gentlemen there to talk sugaring too. Most of my sugaring equipment, including our boiling pan, came from ‘Dan & Whit’s’.

The hydrometer is a way to test the syrup for its density. Maple sap is syrup at 7 degrees fahrenheit above the boiling point of water at that same time and place. There is a mouthful! This is usually around 219 degrees fahrenheit. All kinds of drama occurs just when syrup is ready so it’s really helpful to have a hydrometer. For one thing, it helps me know when I have reached the syrup point before I have a boil over. More on boil overs later. Maybe even photos if you are really lucky!

Felts are big wool filters used to remove impurities from the sap, including something called sugar sand or nitre. This is a harmless precipitate that is considered objectionable by the maple trade. Felts are used at the very end of the sugaring process when the syrup is being put up and bottled.

‘Dan & Whit’s’ offers many varieties of fancy Maple leaf shaped glass containers and decorated tins to put up the syrup in, but I now use plain quart canning jars. I have come to prefer these over tins. Never ever was a fan of the plastic jugs so common these days. Yuck.

I mostly use metal taps for tapping the trees. I’ll try to get a close up shot of one of these this season so you can see how the bucket hangs off this tap. The technology is very wabi sabi, very efficient, and elegant. The tapping hole is made with a 7/16th inch drill bit. Our neighbor’s sugaring operation puts in 6,000 taps. They use an electric drill, but we use this lovely old fashioned drill with a silky porcelain door knob sort of thing that you can lean your body against as you drill. This too was a gift from Teddy. You can see a photo of Will using this drill earlier in my series of blogs. The holes are put into the tree at a slight upward slant so that the sap runs out well.

We use a few plastic taps with one row of trees set on a steep slope that is hard to access. The taps on these trees are connected to plastic tubing. This tubing merges into one tube that flows downhill into one big container. Not so wabi sabi but quicker to collect.

Each year, before I tap, I ask the Maple grove we sugar if it wants to have a sugaring season. For all the years we have had these particular trees to tap, they have always asked to be tapped, even when I thought they might want a rest.

Maple groves or “sugar bushes” are hot commodities in my village. I was part of a cooperative sugaring operation for a number of years, but it got a bit crazy with lots of people who said they wanted to help, but only a few of us actually doing the work. We had hundreds of trees tapped and not enough hands, so eventually I left that cooperative and waited for some trees to become available to tap for a smaller operation.

For the trees I now tap, there was a wait until another sugarer lost interest in these trees. Once we had permission from the landowner to tap these trees, it was understood by other backyard sugarers in town that these trees are now ours to tap from season to season. Everyone is very meticulous about respecting each other’s sugar bush territory. However, there is a lot of rubber necking to see who has put their taps in when, how full someone’s collecting tanks are, and whether they seem to be boiling more or less that everyone else is boiling. This time of year I look for excuses to go into the village to see if the biggest sugaring operation in town is cranking. If their roof is billowing out telltale Maple sap steam, I will stop in for a schmooze. Sugaring is all about the schmooze.

Back to our precious group of Maples, unless the landowner withdraws permission, these trees will remain in our care from season to season. I appreciate that, because these trees have become friends.

We tap several old mother Maple trees in a hedgerow along an old pasture. They have been giving their sap to sugarers for decades. Each season, I ask them how many taps they want and where they want us to put in the taps. Usually it is no more than two taps per tree but a couple of the biggest mother Maples sometimes ask for three. Traditional wisdom is to tap underneath bigger branches because this is where the sap will be flooding up into these branches. Most of our taps also go in on the south side of the trees. I am rarely guided to put taps on the north side of the trees though the traditional wisdom is to put them on all sides of the tree. The north side taps don’t seem to run much until the very end of the season for us and the end of the season is usually very short. Most of the other trees we tap are young fifty year old trees. They are clustered on a shadier hillside. This means the mother Maples on the hedgerow usually run sooner than the shaded trees.

Over the years, we have tapped in all sorts of weather. We try to wait until the weatherman suggests a stretch of freezing nights and above freezing warmer days is about to begin, but like everything about sugaring, it’s all a bit of a guessing game. This year we tapped on a day that just felt right. It turned out to be a bit chillier than I expected. I wished I had brought my hat! Nonetheless, it was wonderful to be outside! It turned out to be a good day to tap. Everything, including the Maple trees, was unthawing and the sap was flowing.

Conditions underfoot are also variable from year to year. Several years, we tapped in snow up to our thighs. Collecting through these big snow seasons was a comical process. We would plunge through snow drifts up to our waists, then try to move our full collecting buckets from where they sat, above us on top of the snow drifts. Later in the season when the snows melted, the buckets on the trees were very high up and hard to comfortably reach for emptying.

One year as we waded through this deep, deep snow to tap the trees, it was also so warm that we were dressed in t-shirts. This year there was only a very little bit of snow on the ground and it was bright and sunny.

As I mentioned, the sap was running when I put the taps in this year, but it didn’t run much and then things froze up again for another week until this past Sunday when we had an enormous run. Maple gurus in town and on the radio suggest that our slow start was because we didn’t have much snow this winter so the frost was deep in the ground.

Sap goes up into the trees when the ground begins to thaw and the air warm ups. This same sap goes back down into the roots when the air chills off at night. This up and down flow is why there is a sugaring season here. If it stays cold, the sap doesn’t move from the tree roots. If the weather warms up too fast and stays too warm then the sugaring season is brief because the sap won’t go back down into the roots at night.

In the ideal Maple sugaring season, we would have a series of days, even weeks of below freezing nights and above freezing days with sap to collect every day. Most years are some sort of strange variation of days when you think it should run and it doesn’t and days when it runs despite the wrong conditions. It seems to be a case of science meeting the mystery of Maples and Maples prevailing with their own magic.

Our first collecting tank was a makeshift container that leaked dramatically during the bouncy ride back from our trees in town to the farm. We had some rather wet years with sap sloshing and spilling into the back of various vehicles despite many small children lying on the top of the container to minimize spillage. Finally we broke the code of backyard sugaring and took a ride down to Bascom’s Sugar House in Alstead, NH to buy ourselves a proper NEW holding tank. This baby sits up proudly in our farm pick up truck, ready to hold up to 125 gallons of sap. It is really exciting when this tank gets full! Actually everything about this tank gives me a thrill. This last Sunday for example, when we went to collect, most of our buckets were almost full or completely full of sap. By the time we had gathered the sap from all the trees, we had about 100 gallons of sap swirling around in the tank to transport back up our hill.

Bascom’s is a great place to visit. Actually, I never saw a sugaring operation I didn’t want to stop in and visit. At Bascom’s, there are always the most interesting old gentlemen filling the place and folks like me who are doing the odd ten to twenty gallon operation. If you have a couple of Maples in your yard and want to give the whole thing a try, Bascom’s has a mail order catalog.

We put in about 40 taps. Traditionally wisdom is that you get about one quart of syrup per tap, but that has never been our experience. Maybe because we love the trees and let them choose the sweet spots, we always seem to get up to twice that amount of syrup from our taps. This means we get enough sap to boil down to 15 or 20 gallons of syrup from taps that would be expected to give 10 gallons. One sugarer told me I must be “doing it wrong” to be getting so much syrup, but I maintain it is all about LOVE!

I do think that most sugarers have an innate love for the trees and a respect for them, even if it isn’t quite the same kind of rapport as here at Green Hope Farm. I am not sure what the typical Maple sugarer would make of my conversations with the trees or whole approach! Over time, I hope our different world views will come together. With the traditional farmers who hay our field, they like to discuss the mysteries of why their cows prefer our grass over other fields they hay. They also have learned to call me before they hay the field so I can tell the Elementals they are coming. If they don’t call, their hay making equipment immediately breaks down on the first turn around our field. A few years of breakdowns made it easier for the farmers to remember to call ahead as requested. Whether they think they need to do this because I really need to give the Nature Spirits a heads up or because they think Green Hope Farm is just an odd place, we work together harmoniously. Maybe Maple sugaring in New England will become a similar hybrid some day.

Our boiling process is kindness of my brother in law Stephen, the very same engineer who built our Flower Essence bottling units. Actually, Stephen is the one who got us official permission to tap the Maple trees we tap. He found himself between jobs one February and thought he would make syrup on the stove in his small apartment. After his first day of boiling, he had peeled the wallpaper off his kitchen walls and processed only a couple gallons of his sap stockpile. He drafted us to join his operation and we set up a boiling system here at the farm with some Stephen innovations that we still use. For example, Stephen rebuilt a sap holding container to have a long thin pipe coming out of its bottom. This pipe can be opened just a little bit to let sap drip into the boiling pan so slowly that it doesn’t stop the boil. This works so much better than pouring big bucketfuls into the boiling pan. Bucketfuls cool off the boiling sap and then the whole pan has to be brought up to a boil again.

The best kind of boiling pan or evaporator has drop flue pans with v shapes extending down into the firebox so that the fire hits a lot more surface area of the pan and the sap boils off faster. Going from about forty gallons of sap down to that one gallon of syrup takes a long, hot fire. Maybe someday I will have a pan like that. I used them in other sugaring operations I have been a part of and they are great. Right now, I have this basic flat bottomed pan. At least I have a pour off spout.

With a fancy evaporator you move the sap from one area of the pan to another as it gets boiled down. Ultimately, you have a finishing pan where you get your sap right to the perfect point of being syrup. Then you pour it off fast and move more sap into the finish pan before the pan burns. This is great because you can put up the syrup right then and there. Plus you never have to stop your operation to pour off but can keep the whole thing going and going.

The way we do things, we boil down our sap all day long in the same pan. Then we have a sort of touch and go period at the end of the day as we try to get the sap close to done, but not overdone. Overdone sap is a scorched boiling pan. If I don’t boil the sap close enough to done, I then have to do a really long finish boil in the house. Consequently, I am always trying to get my sap really close to done before I bring it into the house to finish it off. I never quite know when to stop putting wood on the fire and let the pan simmer to a stop. The fire has to be virtually out when I pour off the day’s boil or the heat will burn the empty pan. During sugaring season, I am often out in my nightgown with a flashlight in the dark of night, scratching my head, trying to decide whether to add more wood or not.

nota bene: If you have been reading this blog for very long you probably think I am always in my nightgown or at least always putting on my nightgown before it’s a good idea. This could be true.

After many misadventures in boil overs as we finish off the syrup in the house, we have a pretty good system down. I probably think it is better than Jim who doesn’t like a stove top permanently crusted with burnt sugar. During sugaring season, the house smells like sap, has really high humidity, and resembles a museum of sugaring paraphernalia. The kitchen is a landscape of used felts, clean felts, jar lids, empty jars, full jars, thermometers, hydrometer, clothes pins, with a tiny piece of paper keeping track of it all.

Today is Tuesday. I boiled on Sunday. Then I boiled all yesterday in a downpour. This was the proverbial slow boat to China because our pan is outside exposed to the elements, which in this case meant torrential rain. I don’t know how much of what we boiled down yesterday was rainwater. Probably a lot. Now I have a little bit left to boil off today and then I will take this first batch into the house. We should get about 2 to 3 gallons of syrup from this first run. Sap earlier in the season has a little more sugar in it than later in the season which means less sap makes more syrup. This is also one of the reasons why early syrup is paler in color than late season syrup. It just hasn’t boiled down as much.

Pale syrup from early runs is called Frenchman’s Blonde. It has a very delicate Maple taste. Frenchman Blonde is more expensive than darker grades of syrup and is used for candy making. Darker runs have a stronger Maple taste, so I actually like darker syrup better. I seem to be in the minority of sugarers about this. They generally seem to like the taste of these first runs best.

Today, when I finish this boil, I will look at the color to judge where we are in the season. It’s late for our season to have just begun. Usually we have at least one run or two in February, but not this year. Because the season is starting late, we may not get any Frenchman’s Blonde. We may move right to a darker grade syrup. I will report back in on this.

Ben is working to be able to upload photos larger than our first two microscopic sized attempts. I have a few “action shots” of sugaring to post as soon as we have figured out this glitch. In the meantime, think of me dashing in and out of the office to stoke the fire under my boiling pan. And hey, right now I am actually not in my nightgown!

One reason Jim became a sixth grade teacher is because of his sixth grade teacher.

If Will Sheehan becomes a fifth grade teacher, I won’t be surprised.

When Will started fifth grade, the only book he would voluntarily crack was a sports almanac. When asked to read a chapter book for an assignment, he would find the shortest book with the largest lettering and suffer through it, before returning to his statistics.

One oft remembered highlight of brother Ben’s career in middle school was his fifth grade project on black holes. This “major research project” was started the night before it was due and consisted of a paper mache ball painted black. Ben managed to graduate from high school and college, so I didn’t really pay too much attention to brother William’s decided reluctance to engage in any academic subject beyond Red Sox batting averages.

But lo and behold, fifth grade dawned and Will caught the reading bug. First he read all twelve of the Series of Unfortunate Events books. Then he took his beloved beanie baby collection off the shelf over his bed and filled it with chapter books read and chapter books yet to read. Next he tackled the Chronicles of Narnia series. He is just wrapping up the fifth one in that series. These days, he often goes to bed of his own accord, with a book and a cat. And he reads long after I have fallen asleep.

Then there is math class. Right now, he is working on a strictly optional problem set. Using only the numbers 1,4, 8, and 9 Will is building 100 math problems. Using those four numbers, problem #1 has to have the answer 1. Problem #2 has to have the answer 2 etc. He has done all but four problems. Everyone he knows is involved in thinking about problem #38. Saying “It’s like problem #38.” has now gone into the family lexicon as indicating a knotty situation.

So, it is an understatement to say that his fifth grade teacher has lit a fire about learning in William. And no wonder. Mrs. Gallagher is a teacher with an infectious joy for life. You can’t spend five minutes with her before you realize she is the rare soul who loves each of the students in her charge with profound tenderness, humor, zest, and energy. And let’s face it, energy is important with a group of eleven year olds. Willy can sometimes be sort of monosyllabic about life at school, but no matter what small tidbit is being shared, this year he shares it with a grin. He is loving learning and loving his life!

This is all pretty amazing considering what Mrs. Gallagher and her students have experienced this year. In December, a classmate died with his family in a house fire. Ours is a very small town with a very small school. The kids in Mrs. Gallagher’s classroom had known Ben Putnam since he was in kindergarten, if not preschool. This family’s death was a profound experience for everyone in the town and particularly complicated for Ben’s friends and Ben’s teacher.

So Mrs. Gallagher, new to the town, new to the United States actually, because she is from Canada, found herself experiencing her own grief while also being the container to help her whole class live with Ben’s disappearance from their lives. I don’t honestly know what a teacher would have done when I was in fifth grade if a classmate had died, but I very much doubt anyone would have handled it with the same kind of honesty, grace, and genuineness of Mrs. Gallagher.

Just one example. One day, she had the whole class open Ben’s locker and sort through his stuff. They all got to try on his baseball caps, pull on his extra pair of pants, and handle all his stuff. Life is so much a physical experience and eleven year olds still know and live this. Their life with Ben in the classroom was one big rumble. In so many of the photos that surfaced after Ben’s death, Ben and his classmates are in a big pile on top of each other. And so Mrs. Gallagher had then all physically engage with Ben’s stuff. Physically process his death. This was a profound act of courage on her part to break down the distance, dismiss taboos about a dead person’s stuff, let them feel all they were feeling, and find their own sense of Ben as they fingered parts of his life On that day as with every day since Ben’s death, she helped them be present to the biggest event in their lives and helped them know if was okay to feel everything they felt.

In her tender tangible concern for how each child is living with this unexpected tragedy and in her willingness to stay present to an ongoing experience of loss and grief shared by everyone in the classroom and reflected in various ways, Mrs. Gallagher is giving each child a template for life. There are so many mysteries about why this happened and why each of these children is going through this intense experience at such a young age, but I am heartened in the sweetness of life that gave them Mrs. Gallagher as their teacher for this journey. She is helping each child in her classroom learn, by her example, how to hold both sorrow and joy at the same time. Could you ever learn anything more important?