It’s April the First, and it’s Poetry Month

 

We are going to start Poetry Month this year with two very small very lovely early poems by the soulful and wonderful young Leonard from Montreal.

Here they are, from pp. 63 and 64 of A Spice Box of Earth, published in 1961 when he was 27 and I was 16:

FOR ANNE

With Annie gone,

whose eyes to compare

With the morning sun?

Not that I did compare,

But I do compare

Now that she’s gone.

SONG

I almost went to bed

without remembering

the four white violets

I put in the button-hole

of your green sweater

and how I kissed you then

and you kissed me

shy as though I’d

never been your lover

That’s all, two poems for you on the first day of the month of poetry.

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!