Sugaring

I spent the entirety of yesterday (Saturday) sugaring. I am not, by nature, a rabid outdoorsman. Too many years of my life were spent finding sleep wherever it could be stolen, in bushes, under a HMMWV, which, for reasons that still make sense to me, is an incredibly comfortable place to sleep. I’m not big into camping, or even glamping.

But sugaring is different.

It was gray and quiet, the kind of early Vermont spring day where the air feels suspended between seasons. Flurries drifted down, not enough to matter, just enough to remind you that winter hasn’t quite loosened its grip. The woods were damp and patient. We’d been collecting sap ever since late February, when the warming days start the run.

One of my daughters was with me the entire day. Not for a stretch of it. Not for the easy parts. The whole day. Buckets, lines, the long, repetitive work of gathering and hauling. She didn’t complain. She’s my quiet one. Maybe too smart, sometimes. There’s a clarity to it. A purpose that doesn’t need to be explained or sold to them. We fed a fire for 8 hours, with the twigs and then sticks and then logs winter had left scattered through our sugar bush and back yard.

Twenty gallons of sap reduced down, slowly, patiently, into something far smaller and far better. Syrup that will stretch forward into the months ahead, pancake breakfasts from now until Labor Day, maybe until Thanksgiving. That’s the magic of it. It’s the simplest thing in the world to drill holes, collect the sap, and boil it. It connects you to Iroquois birch bark lodges; it connects you to the earth. You spend a day doing something that looks, from the outside, inefficient, almost archaic, and what you get is more than breakfast. A thread that runs forward. A reminder, months from now, of this exact day, the cold, the flurries, her small hands helping with work that matters.

I thought about my grandfather a lot. Western Massachusetts. He was a quiet man, thoughtful, a little removed from the noise of the world. Held a PhD in Chemistry and a law degree. Not a great man. Quick to leave a marriage anyway. I never liked that part of him, but it wasn’t my grudge to hold. He was introverted in the way that doesn’t announce itself but shapes everything. I see shades of that introversion in myself now more than I probably ever saw of my parents when I was younger. There’s something about grandparents: the distance, the lack of daily friction, that lets you recognize deeper traits. The temperament. The way they moved through the world. If you were lucky enough to know them, they become a kind of mirror you don’t realize you’ve been carrying.

And I think he would have understood this day.

There was a protest today, No Kings. I agree with what they’re trying to do. I understand the impulse, the need to stand up, to be counted, to push back. For people wired that way, it matters. It’s necessary. But I didn’t go. Not because I don’t care, but because I chose, deliberately, not to give the day over to Donald Trump, even in opposition.

There is a gravitational pull to him, to everything he represents, that can take more from you than you realize. Time. Attention. Emotional bandwidth. Entire days. And I have spent enough of my life, in one way or another, reacting to forces outside my control.

Yesterday was not one of them.

Instead it was the woods. The harsh March air. My daughter beside me. A memory that will outlast any news cycle, any speech, any outrage of the moment. Years from now, she won’t remember what was trending or who said what. But she might remember the cold air, the slow drip of sap, the way we worked together, the feeling of being part of something simple and real.

There is a kind of defiance in that that we all can access when we put our cell phones down.

Because for all the ways the world feels like it’s being bent, reshaped, even desecrated by forces that seem larger than any one person, the truth is simpler than we allow ourselves to believe. He is not everything. He is not even most things. He is a loud, persistent presence in a narrow slice of our lives. And we choose, every day, how much of ourselves we hand over to that.

He will be gone soon. Father Time is undefeated. And we will remain.

My daughter and I spent a whole day unplugged, cold, and smoky.

And that was a better use of time.