Stories From the Homeplace

For children who were used to Florida our first winter in New Hampshire was quite an experience. Our new home at my grandparent’s old house had five acres for us to explore and part of that five acres was a large hill so sledding was a must. That wasn’t the only thing that hill was used for though. It also was the home of several mature sugar maple trees. As children we had no idea these trees were special but my father knew. He had noticed the trees and seen the old buckets and spouts in the shed and he knew what to do with them. That first year one warm day in late January when we children’s only concern was that it actually felt warm outside, even if the snow was still covering the ground, my father set out with several buckets and spouts and an odd looking hand drill. We children, of course, followed. He came to the first tree, drilled out a hole with the hand drill, inserted a spout with a few taps of the hammer and hung the bucket on the little hook underneath the spout. We watched as it started to drip and he explained to us that it was for making syrup for pancakes. To my brother and I this was all great fun and we happily went with him whenever he went out collecting the sap.

After several days of collecting sap, it was taken to the smokehouse where my father had started a fire. Over this fire he put a his boiling pot which happened to be a metal 55 gallon barrel which he had cut in half long ways. The sap was strained through cheesecloth and then put in the barrel to boil. My father spent several days and nights in the smokehouse boiling down this sap until it was just right and then the syrup was bottled and another batch started.

We soon got our first taste of pancakes with real maple syrup on them. At first they tasted kind of strange to us since we were only used to the store bought maple syrup but we soon became used to the taste and forgot what store bought tasted like.

Indian summer doesn’t last long and the snows soon returned. One evening after a day of fresh, powdery snowfall, my father gave each of us children a bowl and told us to go out and get a bowlful of fresh, clean snow. We bundled up and ran out to get our snow all the while asking what we were doing it for. “You’ll see,” said my mother. Now any time one of our parents said, “You’ll see,” it always meant something good was coming. We made a sport out of who could find the cleanest patch of snow then quickly filled our bowls and ran back inside. We could smell the maple syrup when we came back in. My mother had it in a pot on the stove and had warmed it just a bit. We each brought her out bowls and she drizzled warm maple syrup all over our fresh snow. “What is it?” we asked my father. “That is sugar on snow,” he told us. It became one of our favorite treats. After that any time we had fresh powdery snow fall, we would be begging for a bowl of “sugar on snow”.