Maple Sugaring

Jennifer and I were collecting sap in a small sugar orchard on a perfect day in March. Sunrise had been pink, and cold. Now, at bright noontime, rivers quickened with snowmelt, dirt roads became mud soup. The whole world ? the hills and the hollows and the woods and the brook ? smelled of the earthy decadence of spring.
Spring?s first blood-rush was coursing through the sugar maples and spilling, plink?plink?plink?into galvanized buckets.
We were engaged in that timeless New England tradition, a tradition linked inextricably to New England?s image of rural wholesomeness, of quaint self-reliance, of purity of spirit and of produce.
We were making maple syrup.
And, very stupidly, I was straddling a stone wall, standing shin-deep in sloppy snow, with a five-gallon bucket of sap in one hand. I reached across the wall to lift another bucket off a tree.
You know what happened next.
I slipped and ground my knee savagely into the stone wall.
And let loose with a string of curses so vile that my dead Irish grandmother is probably still appealing to St. Peter on my behalf.
Grimacing, but too embarrassed to admit to my wound or my stupidity, I climbed into the truck and we bumped back down to the sugarhouse.
The men were there, engaged in the time-honored New England ritual of standing around the evaporator -- and telling rude jokes.
My favorite: What?s the difference between a New Hampshire sugar maker and a Vermont sugar maker?
A Vermonter goes along, collecting sap. He comes to a bucket, lifts the lid, and finds a drowned squirrel inside. He looks all around to make sure nobody?s watching. Then he throws the squirrel away and pours the sap into his collecting tank.
A New Hampshire sapper comes along, and finds a drowned squirrel in his sap bucket. He looks all around to make sure nobody?s watching, rings the squirrel out into his bucket, then throws the squirrel away and pours the sap into his collecting tank.
Then we start on the Red Sox.
Nomar is cussed. Grady Little is cussed. We reach way back and cuss Harry Frazee for selling Babe Ruth. The Yankees are cussed, bitterly. (Someone risks complimenting Steinbrenner?s pitching staff. More cussing, and louder.)
And that was before anyone told a sheep joke.
Or a Roger-Clemens-and-a-sheep joke.
You get the idea.

If the world ever knew what was said around New England evaporators ? all in the process of making ?pure? maple syrup.
(And it?s no different in Vermont ? the state that holds the patent on wholesome. They curse the Red Sox and tell the same bad jokes we do. Difference is, we admit it. Maybe we even revel in some.)
People buy maple syrup because it?s the best-tasting stuff in the world.
And it is, to be sure, pure of content, the unadulterated distillation of early spring in New England.
But people from New Jersey, say, and California also buy something else when they lay down their $9.95 per quart.
They buy nostalgia.
They like to look at the jug on the breakfast table and imagine some sugarhouse in a little hollow somewhere, where green plastic tubing in ne?er to be seen, and a happy farmer rocks on his heels, reciting Frost without irony, as the sap bubbles on through the night.
If they knew we were over here cussing knee injuries and the Red Sox and making crude wildlife jokes, they might think us impure. Somewhat less than quaint. And they might think our syrup tainted by association.
So -- don?t tell.
But it?s really not true about the squirrel.