What A Week

IT'S BOILING SEASON, NO, NOT FOR POLITICANS, FOR MAPLE SYRUP

Things are just too busy for me to spend too much time writing on this thing this week.

I've been boiling maple sap down into syrup, and with the temperatures hovering between -5 at night, to +5 during the day, the sap is running quicker than I can cook it. I started this morning again at 4 AM, and will hopefully have another 20 litres cooked down by 10Am. It's amazing how much sap it actually takes to make the stuff, and it is amazing that we have boiled hundreds of gallons of the water like substance already.

My parents' Mennonite heritage has obviously stuck to me in some regards. I grew up on a family farm 20 miles north of Woodstock in the late 1960's and lived there until 1983. Each spring, like clockwork, we would head out to the bush(we had 23 acres of bush),and start the hunt for the largest hard maples(at least 35-40 years old) and begin the process of tapping the trees. Quite often we would head out before the first spring thaw, making it easier to get around the snow filled bush while the ground was hard and begin the tapping process weeks in advance. Those were some of the greatest times in my life, and I suppose boiling maple syrup is a great way to revisit those times.

I'm kind of glad to do without the wood cutting aspect though. Each fall we would spend a month "circling" wood back in the bush. Most of the trees had been cut down earlier in the spring, and were left to dry over the summer months. we would shorten them to 4 foot lengths, and then 1 at a time we would take the shortened logs, toss them onto the "circling" table, and Dad would slide the mechanism back and forth, slicing off 1 foot sections of logs for us to carry away to a trailer/wagon. My brother and I would spend our time splitting these small pieces in half with an axe, and then we'd throw them into the basement of the house. The old McCormick w-6 would grunt like mad when Dad pushed the logs into the blade, and the odd time the drive belt would fly off from the stress on the saw blade. It was always kind of scary to see that 1 foot wide belt that was 50 feet long come flying at you at 100 MPH...
It was always....DUCK!!!!!(accompanied by a few of my dads' favourite german swear words that he thought we didn't understand) before the big "snap" of the belt came flying over your head.
I guess maybe in some ways, farming can be a bit of a treachorous practice....if you aren't careful.

It is kind of strange though to want to spend my time doing this now because when I was a kid I remember thinking, why don't we just buy sugar like everyone else because the amount of work involved in getting maple syrup seemed such a waste to me.

Now I realize it was more about spending time with your family, learning self sufficiency, and maintaining a semblance of tradition in the family. I guess making maple syrup is my contribution to maintaining the history that was handed down to me by my parents.(without the mennonite overtones)

Now both of my oldest sons have gained the knowledge of the process that was handed down to me, and to my parents through successive generations of ancestors. And someday I hope they pass this on to their offspring....but not quite yet!