The hardest time of year in New England for me are the weeks before the weeks between winter and spring. Not quite time for mud season but with the depth of the winter cold definitely already passed. The ground still hard, the ice still frozen in layers — not really arctic ice cores, but as close as we get around here. And air that really wants to warm up having the heat drained out of it by the ground below.
I want mud season, when the dirt roads turn to soup, when the air smells of firewood and maple syrup. I am impatient. I know.
I am anticipating the drive up into the hilltowns to a sugarhouse that I have visited nearly every year where I can walk in beside the boiler reducing sap and make my way across the gravel floor to a breakfast flavored with maple syrup and maple cream.
I have watched the winters retreat over the last twenty years. The cross country skiing long gone because it isn’t suited for snow-making, and the last few downhill places knowing that their days are coming to an end as well. And, when I step into a sugarhouse, usually run by multiple generations of a family on land when they have lived for so long that can only be gotten to by roads bearing the family’s name, I know that even this tradition cannot go on forever.
Maple Sugaring needs days above freezing and nights below freezing to keep the sap running. And, as the climate warms, and the snowpack reduces, the lack of natural insulation shortens the sugaring window each year. I am starting to fear that I will know a future where I may see the very last maple syrup from a local tree. Where the productive trees have all receded north, into Canada. Where no local kids know about Sugar on Snow.
Each year, every drop of syrup, becomes more rare, more precious.
So, here I am waiting for the telltale mud; dreaming of maple cream.