I walked crosslots, feeling giddy and free after weeks of recovery from a traumatic injury, that damaged not just my hand, but my sense of independence. Took some time to get past that fragile state, where sudden bouts of crying and startled jumpiness prevailed....
“Look at this big crack!”, I said to the boys. It extended clear across the pond. “Never come down here without a big person,” I admonished, many times. We scribed out a Fox and Geese pattern while David plowed off a hockey rink. In our attic...
Calling All Vermonters! In conjunction with the Governor’s Tree Tapping, February 28, 2017, at Silloway Maple in Randolph Center, there will be a maple specialty foods contest open to Vermont residents. We hope to see how cooks from all around Vermont use our favorite agricultural product,...
Excerpt from A Farm Wife’s Journal When I was 27, I married a dairy farmer and moved to northern Vermont. Dan leased a farm there, and we lived up back of the barn in a trailer. The winters in Greensboro are cold and snowy, but I was...
A farmer, a maple sugarmaker, a homemaker, a mother…common, ordinary, rather humble job titles to many. Little do they know that I walked to work today (looking over sap lines in the woods), on a royal jeweled carpet. Like a child, I picked up the...
My entire life has been spent in the sugarwoods, one way or another. As a child, riding always on the gathering sled or trailer, hanging on for dear life, mittens soaked with sap slopping up out of the filter, and hours in the sugarhouse while...
I was musing about mowing lawns next summer, then talking about going to the sugarwoods, when Paul, scowling, said,“Why can't you just walk on the road, like the other ladies?”...
Crosslots-itis. A day in the sugarwoods, and I’ve got a case of it. One of the woods stands on a nearly vertical plane, with one main line running up the center, and others coming off it to the sides, horizontally across the mountain....
Tapping in heavy snow. This is a photo of the five-sixteenth line that runs to each tap on each tree. Paul says, "Just before it goes under."...