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."...
Welcome to my world…Paul started tapping this morning at 6:00 a.m., with his headlamp, and headed home tonight at 6:00 p.m. That's a day and a half, in the steepest neck of the woods, and snow coming down relentlessly. Mare and I worked together. The...
Laura and I rode along with David when he went off to college in Virginia. We stayed in a motel in Leesburg, and is my habit, I took a walk. There, right under my feet, imbedded in the sidewalk, were quotes such as these, from...
I drove to a lawn-mowing job, got turned around, and reached behind the pick-up seat for my ear-muffs. Not there. I cannot mow without them; years of driving tractors and moving wood beside a running chainsaw have left my ears sensitive to noise. I searched...
I went to a seminar on website marketing. “Analyze the traffic,” the man instructed, so as to count the number of visitors to our new site, and so on. The information was all new to me. Yesterday, I hiked back to the sugarwoods. The season is over, and...