Boiling the Sap: A Cautionary Tale

If you read yesterday’s post (you can scroll down to find it, since A Story of Sap Flowing is a necessary precedent to boiling the sap), you will know that I built a fire and started to boil the sap I had collected.  If you are wondering about the cautionary aspect of this tale, we are all right so far – the rocks were piled high enough around the fire, and even with a pretty good wind blowing (east the first day, west the second) I wasn’t worried about the fire getting out of control.

It was a good fire, and I was able to burn a fair bit of the pine that was around to keep the pot on the boil, and midway through the second day I was down from 20 litres of sap in my containers to 10 litres in the pot.  And it was a great fire, as you can see, for cooking Smokies on a skewer and then eating them on the deck.  We even went away for an hour to photograph crows and got our neighbor, who was outside anyway, to keep an eye on the fire while we were gone so there was no danger from that. 

I switched from pine to maple, which burned longer and gave a good heat, and you could have seen me at ten that night still tending my fire and still checking the boil of my sap, and by the time I turned in we were down under 5 litres, developing a good colour, and giving off a sweet smoky maple syrup smell.  I went to sleep happy.

The next morning I made the first serious error: I put the boiled down sap into our large Paderno pot, brought it in, and turned on the stove.  I was, however, properly cautious.  I put the stovetop vent on high, and because it was a warm enough day, I opened a couple of doors to keep a good breeze through the kitchen.  So far, so good.  I looked up the instructions again right here (you will note if you check it out that the site is named, somewhat ironically in my case, greatdreams), and then got out my candy thermometer and checked the temperature.  Still OK.

The sap boiled down and I reduced the heat.  It was looking good.  I had my bottles out with a funnel and a cloth to pour my syrup through.  I checked the temperature again, and it was still fine.  Then I made my first big mistake – I went upstairs to send a fax.

This is a tricky operation in our house because you have to disconnect the phone, pull the printer stand as far across the room as the power cord will let it, pull the phone line over to connect to the printer, dial the number, and let it go.  It was busy the first time.  I tried again, and it connected.  I waited for the transmission to finish.  Then I waited for my transmission report.  Finally I went back downstairs.

My second big mistake had been not to turn the heat right down when I left the pot.  I had spent two days outdoors working to keep the thing boiling over the fire, and it never occurred to me to turn it down now.  So I came into a kitchen filled with smoke.  My sap had turned to syrup, then boiled over, then burned.  There was a blackened sticky mess all around the burner, and the pot was filled with carbon ash, like burned marshmallow.

I turned off the burner, took the smoke alarm and the pot outside, and scooped about three tablespoons of maple syrup from the stove top and put it in a tiny jar.  It tasted really good, and over the next couple of days as I worked for hours to clean up my messes and the smell of burnt sugar grew fainter in the kitchen, I gave myself a tiny taste now and again to remind me of what might have been.

So if you read a news story like this one about the coming maple syrup shortage, you will know that besides the weather, I too am part of the problem.  And the caution is this: stay close to your pot and pay close attention, because that critical maple syrup moment  can come and go pretty quickly, and there's no going back if you miss it.

A Story of Sap Flowing

It is the end of March and the sap has pretty much stopped flowing, but earlier in the month it was abundant.  In fact, on March 8, when it was 10 degrees and sunny after a solidly cold night, I collected about eight litres from the two maples I tapped this year, better than the 2 degrees and half a litre I collected the day before.

The trees are really two separate trunks of a substantial maple clump that grows next to the small stream that flows from the pond next to our branch of Stanbrae Road (though it is a pond only some of the time – as A., the eldest of my granddaughters, wisely informed me one day at the age of five, “It’s a swamp, Rogie.”).  One of the trees has a thick yellow nylon rope with a thumb knot in the end of it hanging down over the stream, and A. has always enjoyed grabbing it and swinging over the water (or the rocks, when my “pond” is once again a swamp). At any rate, it has been spring throughout March, the stream has been flowing from the pond, I have worn my Bogs to step across to the trees, and the sap has been flowing fairly well.

I drilled the trees, hammered in the two spiles, and hung up my President’s Choice cranberry juice containers to catch the sap.  On a good day I might empty them several times into the 10-litre container I kept there, and sometimes there was even an overflow of my precious sap running down the maple trunk.  On a not so good day, I might not get much more than a few flies in the containers checking out the sweetness in there.

I didn’t have permission to boil my sap down inside the house and didn’t want to use the propane cylinders for the little Coleman (like I did two years ago), so I bought a big pot at the Sally Ann and built up my outdoor fireplace to accommodate a grille for the boiling.

The ratio of sap to syrup is 40:1, so the 20 litres of sap I had collected should be good for half a litre of my own Stanbrae Road maple syrup.  They say it takes 15 hours to boil your sap down, so I got my fire started and kept on feeding it, getting myself, my jacket, and my jeans pretty smoky in the process.

The sap started to boil, and I kept topping up the pot, feeling a pleasant satisfaction as my sap supply reduced and what was in the pot was beginning to show some colour.

I will stop there in the telling of this ultimately cautionary tale to inform you that the sharply bright first quarter moon is high in our black sky tonight, reflecting pinpoints of white light on the car’s roof and hood.  And I will continue the tale in my next post.

The Last Day of our Brief Interlude of Summer

This is an image of the harbour today.  The wind is NNW 45 km/h, gusting to 58.  The temperature is 10 degrees.  Tonight it will go down to minus 5, and the high tomorrow is 7.  On Tuesday of next week, the forecast high is zero and we may have snow flurries.  All of that is appropriate because it is, after all, still March here in Ferguson’s Cove.  Spring did arrive last Tuesday, but we all know that that just means equal amounts of day and night and no promises of anything more.  So a clear and not too cold day with strong winds out of the north is pretty much par for the course for us right about now.

Today is not a bad day to be outdoors, especially if you are in the sun and out of the wind, but it’s nothing like yesterday, the last day of our brief interlude of summer.  Environment Canada will tell you that yesterday was not normal.  If you care to check there, you will see that our normal maximum for March 22 is 5 degrees, and the normal minimum is -4.  And if you check yesterday’s actual readings, you will see a maximum of 27.2 degrees and a minimum (last night up until midnight) of 11.5 degrees (if you’re still stuck in Fahrenheit readings, that means it was 81 at the hottest part of the day and dropped to 53 at night).  It was indeed an interlude of summer.

I don’t have images of yesterday because a camera cannot tell you what the air feels like, and it does still look like early spring here, with a slight reddening of the ends of the birch branches, the beginning bulges of red maple flowers, and the lawn doing its level best to show its true colours.  The only sure sign of that summer warm you can see today is the sudden growth of green shoots in the chives, as if they were waiting for just a hint of encouragement from the weather, and the tulips and daffodils pushing up, but that couldn’t tell you what yesterday, and the two days before, felt like.

Here are some words to help you imagine our brief interlude of summer:

• lunch and supper on the back deck, me in a t-shirt and shorts and still finding it hot;  
• walking in bare feet in the evening and feeling the radiant heat from the stones in our walkway;   
• driving with the car windows wide open; 
• seeing my students in last night’s class in their short shorts, legs still white from winter;   
• noticing the air conditioning on in the Superstore; 
• opening our doors and windows to cool the house off; 
• seeing a guy walking on Herring Cove Road with no shirt on and a newly sunburnt back;   
• driving by the little waterfall coming out of Chocolate Lake and thinking we could maybe swim there; 
• walking out to the car under black night sky and bright stars and being reminded of summer nights in Greece.

The list could go on because the interlude of summer was crazy, but now it’s over.  We’re dropping back towards normal, which is good.  As Lol said, If we keep on having weather like this, we’ll be sure to have bad forest fires.  And it doesn’t have to be up in the twenties for me to love the warmth of the sun in the blue skies of March; those hotter, whiter skies of high summer will come, but I’m content to wait for them and to savour these interludes, long or short, whenever they do happen.

Carpe diem, and don't forget your sunscreen!

Absence of Winter

Today is the 9^th of January, the sun is shining, the skiff of snow from overnight has mostly melted, and we are still patiently awaiting winter.

Yesterday, Sunday, we headed to East Chester around midday for a family gathering.  On Herring Cove Road a young woman was walking along with just a sweatshirt and bare hands.  Now I am used to younger people going around in light jackets, sneakers, and no gloves on frigid winter days, but this girl was not showing off her youthful imperviousness to the season; she was, in fact, dressed appropriately for the day, which had light winds and sunshine and was a few degrees above zero.

As we headed down the 103, the sky was clear with some water-colour clouds (since I was driving and L. was snoozing, there are unfortunately no images – you’ll just have to picture the warm blue clarity of that sky and the softened edges of the lit clouds).  When the sun shone in my side window, it felt as if it was as high in the sky as it is in late March, when you really begin to feel the strength of its warmth; it felt springlike. 

That highway has both shoulder and centre-line milled rumble strips, and a real treat as I drove was to watch the strips on our side that were filled with meltwater and reflected bright segments of trees, sky, and clouds as we flew past.  The brightness of the day and the obvious warmth lifted my spirits, as if the burden of winter had passed, which of course it hasn’t – as I noted in the opening of the piece, we are actually waiting for winter to finally arrive.

We have had fluky days like this other years, and they are a treat when they happen, but this year is different.  Winter really has not arrived yet.  People’s lawns and the Commons were still bright green at Christmas, and even though a couple of good night-time freezes have turned them a little more dun, strong traces of green are still there.  We have had two snowstorms, but both were wet, there are no residual snowbanks anywhere, and lakes and ponds are barely skimmed over with ice.

We all went for a walk along the old rail line trail yesterday, basking in the afternoon sun.  When we returned to the house there was a long conversation about that thing we often want to talk about, the weather.  We didn’t just talk of the winter we are waiting for this year, we got into long-term forecasts and the absence of our winter sports (instead of coasting on the hill, a couple of grandchildren were throwing a baseball, and several of the others were bouncing in the trampoline, one even in bare feet).  L. and I are seriously hoping for some snow to ski over or some good ice on the Frog Pond for skating, but there were those who argued strenuously that the lakes wouldn’t even freeze over this year.  There was a skim of ice on most of the lakes we passed along the highway, but I seriously wonder.  Tonight the low is minus 5 (minus 10 in low-lying areas), but the high tomorrow is plus 3, so I guess we will wait and see.

So, winter, we are ready and waiting, and I know I do tempt fate by saying anything at all about it, but I do hope that we get some semblance of winter weather this year, some brisk outdoor activities involving snow or ice, time to enjoy the warmth of the woodstove after, and spring coming along a little later when we are really ready and really need it.

September Evening

This September evening was quiet, and the air was still.  The crows were calling from Irene's roof and chimney next door to other crows on treetops and power poles throughout the neighbourhood.

The harbour was calm where the small container ship headed into port along the inside passage.

You could still hear the faint sound of swells breaking just beyond the lighthouse as the sun dropped in the sky, but the reflection was steady in the water.

The light was lovely enough to get Lorraine out on the deck with her camera.

The bright white Carnival Glory started to head out to sea.

And the growing moon appeared from among the clouds with their hints of pink above the grey band of fog as the evening continued to drop away into nighttime.

Season's Easing

Today is Saturday.  It is the weekend, though that fact means less, now that I am no longer engaged in fulltime work, than it used to; however, there is still a lightness to a Saturday that is different from other days of the week, perhaps a contact high I pick up when I am among regular working people enjoying their Saturdays, but a high nevertheless.  I used to feel it driving home from my school on a Friday afternoon; now I can’t always predict when it will come, but it is usually something I can count on, especially on a Saturday like this one.

For one thing it is March.  The sun is shining and the wind is out of the south.  It is the season of change where you first notice a palpable easing of the grip of winter.  It is not spring by any means, but there are days now when you can think of going outdoors in shoes instead of boots, where gloves become optional, where the car just seems to run with less effort, where the limitations of what is possible in winter begin to loosen, and you can begin to feel certain intimations of the possibility of what will come.

I miss the feel of Istanbul at this time of year; it’s still too early for the ihlamur and erguvan to be blooming there, but the dark melancholy of an Istanbul winter should be starting to lift right about now.  I can still feel it in the Japanese teapot on the table, which came from an eskici (seller of old things) in Ortakoy and puts me there in those back streets near the Bosphorus, the place mats and table cloth from our Armenian friend in Kapali Carsi (The Grand Bazaar), and the painting of a Bosphorus sea ferry on the wall, a birthday gift from a few years ago that still reminds me of the guy who sold them near the waterfront. 

You can feel the easing of the season outside as winter’s grip on water begins to loosen, allowing snow to sublimate and ice to shrink.  Lawns are starting to show that familiar dun colour of March with the faint hint of green that I always love seeing, and there is a slight rosy blur on the tips of bushes and the tops of birch trees.  If December indicated the descent of (or into) winter, then March may suggest an emergence from it.

The green tea I am drinking was a Christmas gift from X., a delightful IB student, and her gentle father who always served me a generous mug when I went to tutor her, and the tulips on the table that Kelly brought last weekend are in a vase that my great great great grandfather brought with him when he emigrated from England to Canada in the 1840’s.  It’s not clear what is so important to me about these small things, but there is something about the lightness and the easing of this first Saturday in March that allows me to notice and to cherish them.

We’re not going to visit Istanbul this spring, though we’ll certainly be thinking of that place, and we will pay attention here to that gradual loosening my old friend Williams has always reminded me of with his Spring and All:

By the road to the contagious hospital
under the surge of the blue
mottled clouds driven from the
northeast—a cold wind. Beyond, the
waste of broad, muddy fields
brown with dried weeds, standing and fallen

patches of standing water
the scattering of tall trees

All along the road the reddish
purplish, forked, upstanding, twiggy
stuff of bushes and small trees
with dead, brown leaves under them
leafless vines—

Lifeless in appearance, sluggish
dazed spring approaches—

They enter the new world naked,
cold, uncertain of all
save that they enter. All about them
the cold, familiar wind—

Now the grass, tomorrow
the stiff curl of wildcarrot leaf

One by one objects are defined—
It quickens: clarity, outline of leaf

But now the stark dignity of
entrance—Still, the profound change
has come upon them: rooted they
grip down and begin to awaken

                                                              [1923]

It is March, and the seasonal change marches on, just as the freedom fighters also march on toward Tripoli today.  Spring, we can hope, will mean better things for them and for our world.

February 28, 2011

It is eight in the morning on the last day of February.

The sky is clear and the harbour is calm.

It is minus twelve outside but there’s wood in the stove.

The sun is getting higher and warming the house.

The girls have got over their flu and Kelly’s tulips are opening.

There’s still snow for skiing.

But the flower garden kilim gives a nice hint of seasons that could be just around the corner.  Tomorrow a new month marches in.

February 11, 2011

I came back from the Pockwock Lake trails in Mount Uniacke and planned to write a post on the joys of cross country skiing, even when you’re out there skiing alone.  The words and images were in my head as I skied and also as I drove home listening to K.D.Lang, lulled perhaps by my own endorphens.  When I got here, I brought my gear in, cleared the skiff of new snow off the walkway and entrance, made a small sandwich, poured a shot of Jameson’s over a single ice cube, put on a dry t-shirt, fired up the computer, and turned on the TV.

When I left this morning for Uniacke, the Friday midday prayers were finished in Egypt, and protestors were reported to be heading for the Presidential Palace and the State TV building, as well as filling any space that was left in Tahrir Square.  I knew that the Palace was surrounded by the Presidential Guard and that the military had asked the demonstrators to go home.  And I had seen the coverage of the speeches of the two corrupt old henchmen, Mubarak and Suleiman (this one a shameful bearer of the great Sultan Suleyman’s name), as they made their speeches in a desperate attempt to hang onto power, and I saw the anger and disgust of the protesters when they heard what was being said.

As I drove out to Uniacke to see my old colleagues at the school and check out the last of the students who might still remember me, I worried what the military might do today.  Would they, if ordered to, attempt to dispel the demonstrators by force?  And if they didn’t, what might happen then?  I couldn’t imagine Mubarak and Suleiman, who had seemed so out of touch with the demonstrators and why they were there, actually coming to their senses.  And I feared for the people of Egypt who had risked so much to be there and to stay there.

On the TV I saw Robert Gibbs saying good-bye to the White House press corps as he prepared (I guess) to go and do something else.  And when the computer came up, Al Jazeera was very slow loading, so it was the CBC site that told me Mubarak had stepped down.  He had stepped down!  I was elated!  He was hiding out in Sharm El Sheikh.  The thirty years of Mubarak were over! 

Since there was no one here for me to hug and kiss and share my joy, I danced around a little by myself and then sipped my whiskey, ate my sandwich, and thought, Hooray!  Hooray for the brave people of Egypt who stood up, sat down, slept in the treads of the US-made tanks, sang their songs, waved their flags, and refused to leave until the change they needed started to happen.  And it did happen!

I haven’t figured out exactly why I care so much or why this seems to mean so much.  I didn’t like Egypt when we visited five years ago because it felt as if every bit of its heritage was up for sale or sold and because it seemed so corrupt and so beat, and I’m not sure that I’d like those aspects of it a whole lot more now.  But I am happy for the people of Egypt, unaccountably happy really, for what they have accomplished in the last eighteen days. 

There is something about this revolution that is profoundly emotional as well as profoundly political.  And I think that something happened there today that we may be talking about for a long time.  Here is one interesting take on it, and there are any number of other careful and thoughtful analyses to be found at the Al Jazeera site.  Check it out!

I remember walking into the staff room at Uniacke District School on September 11, 2001 and telling the teachers there that I thought the world had changed that day.  It is interesting that I was in that same staff room today, almost ten years later, another day that the world has changed.  Only this change is different and this time I have a small hope that it changed for the better.  My fingers remain crossed for Egypt, and for all of us.

The Brilliance of Winter

Yesterday, the 7^th of February, was a beautiful winter day here in Ferguson’s Cove and in Halifax.  The sun shone, the official temperature rose to at least +2, and (and this is the important part for us here on the eastern coast) there was no wind, none at all.  It was the brilliance of winter.

Various of our friends are heading south to places where the sun may not be brighter, but the air and the ocean will be warmer and they can wear shorts and sandals and sunscreen and forget about winter weather, like today’s snowstorm, which has been slow and wet, but persistent.  I don’t blame them for wanting a break, but there is something wonderful about the winter brilliance of a day like yesterday, and it is something you run the risk of missing if you decide you need to escape winter.

Part of what makes a brilliant winter day so special is the clear and even blue of the winter sky without a wisp of cloud or even a vapour trail, and the matching deeper blue of the harbour below it, set off by the bright whiteness of the snow.

Then there’s the way the sun delineates the branches of the bare trees and creates traces of bluish shadows in the snow.

And the sun has started to climb noticeably higher in the sky where it can melt snow and ice off some of the surfaces like our walkway.

It even provokes early thoughts of possible spring, getting this young busker out balancing and juggling in front of his sidewalk drawing next to the library.

And the same sun has enticed this person, who is sensible enough (or, like me, old enough) to keep her coat on, to at least take off her gloves and read on a park bench in the snow.

On a day like yesterday there was no need for SAD light therapy; all you needed was to walk outside and look around.  The official temperature may have been only 1.7 degrees Celsius, but the fact that the sun rose at 07:26 and didn’t set until 17:32, and that there was no wind all day, gave it the kind of warmth and brilliance that made you realize that winter, no matter how beautiful, would not stay forever and that something special, like they say, could not be far behind.

Spring will spring up soon enough, but right now I just want to get out into more of that bright white winter.