Savoring the big melt ~ April 11, 2002

David Heiller

Sunday was one of those perfect days. Temperatures in the sixties. Bright sun. Melting snow.

After weeks of below normal, cloudy weather, it was the kind of day that would get you pulling a Roger Jensen and running from chore to chore.

Everyone you talked to, at church, at work, in the coffee shop, said the same thing. It’s time for spring. Enough of the bland weather. Bring on Rutabaga Falls. Bring on the big melt.

I walked out to the woods that afternoon to check on the sap buckets. Just the day before it had been a frozen landscape. Frozen snow. Frozen taps. Frozen ice in the buckets.

Our sap boiling set up.

But not Sunday. Sunday was so warm that I was working in a vest and T-shirt. I gathered 25 gallons of sap from the 50 taps in the few short hours that it ran. Combined with 20 gallons we had collected about a month ago, that was enough to start a boil.

I lit a fire in the barrel stove that has been converted to a sap boiler. The sap pan was filled with four inches of sap-ice. I told you it was cold. But a roaring fire took care of that in a hurry, and pretty soon one of the sweetest smell: of spring sifted into the yard. If you have smelled sap boiling, I need say no more. It’s a fragrance that Madison Avenue has yet to capture. It’s very subtle.

Like all good smells, it has pleasant associations. It carries with it the anticipation of hot corn bread covered with syrup, and tulips blooming, and frogs peeping. And tilling the garden, and lying in the hammock and listening to a Twins game. All this plus your favorite spring activity, isn’t far behind when that smell fills the air. Neither is the big melt.

The big melt has a charm that not everyone appreciates. If you live in the country, it means mud, serious mud. It sucked off one of my shoes on Sunday, causing me to do a one-legged triple-sow-chow-double-toe-loop. Luckily, no one saw me hopping around on one leg. I got my foot back into the waiting shoe without falling, and scored a respectable 5.7, except for the French judge who gave me a 5.3.

Canning the finished syrup.

The big melt brings frost boils, and water the basement, and hordes of ladybugs anxious leave our house. (The feeling is mutual.)

Plus, lakes form in places that don’t generally have lakes. Like in the garage. I half expect to see Bob Dutcher pull up with his fishing boat and start fishing in our yard. Knowing, Bob, he would catch something.

I would like to make one selfish request though, for those of you with better connection The Man Upstairs than me. Keep the nights chilly for a while. Below freezing, to be exact. Once the weather gets above freezing and stay there, the sap quits running, and the sweet smell disappears. Let’s savor the big melt for another week or three.