One of the things I love about Vermont is it’s (our) culture and traditions. At about this time of year, when the darkness starts to lift, when the frigidness takes a break as the sun sits in the sky a bit longer than the day before and life that has been dormant for the last however many months begin to take a peek to see if it’s their time to shine, a magical thing happens in these parts which we call… Maple Sugarin’! And… well… for the first time in my life I made my own… MAPLE SYRUP!!
I know I just said that “I” made “my own” maple syrup, but that was a lie. It was actually Amanda and I that made “our own” maple syrup… which now kinda makes me want to describe the “widower” side of this experience because it’s a challenge to be fully Present when your mind is saying things such as, “I wish Kateri and I had tried to tap our trees… or boil sap… make maple syrup from resources right from our own land..!” because she would’ve absolutely, 100%, whole heartedly loved… LOVED… it. Of course, she’s not here and hasn’t been for almost 6 years, but I have been here… and have had to learn how to find happiness in my Day to Day, in this new world with new experiences… without her. I’ve had to change a lot of things about myself, how I think about things, about how I view the world with the hopes of pulling myself out of the mud pit of Loss I was trudging through and to a degree… still am.
Luckily, sometimes when you’re trudging through the mud you find things that you maybe weren’t expecting or even looking for like friendship, companionship… and Love. I might not have been able to boil sap with Kateri, but I was able to have this unique experience with someone I share my home and life with, someone who makes me laugh, someone who I always wanna spend more time with, and most notably to this conversation… someone I Love.
It started with Amanda and I walking through the woods looking for Sugar Maples to tap. This would’ve been a much easier process if we knew what Maple Trees looked like without their leaves! After checking out books with pictures and searching The Oracle for answers, we went and bought 4 taps, sap buckets, and lids to start the inaugural 2024 Little Red Schoolhouse Sugarin’ Season by tapping 3 Sugar Maples… and 1 Northern Red Oak…!.. which is no longer tapped… and we found another Maple. We also scrounged together plastic buckets (food grade) to store the sap in until we had enough to make at least a little bit of syrup… considering it takes 40 gallons of sap to make 1 gallon of syrup!
After about a week we had accumulated around 8-9 gallons of sap and we figured we should boil it off before it spoiled. Now, we’ve never done this before, so we aren’t exactly set up for endeavors like this, but as I figure, and one thing I love about this process, is that at its most basic level, all we really need to do is have enough heat (fire) to boil water/sap and enough time to reduce it down to syrup. We can do that!… We’ve got the technology! So, on the windiest day of the week, we set up our Sugarin’ Station in the most inefficient way possible and spent the day… and part of the night!… chopping down trees to fuel the fire as our sap made that magical transformation from sweet water that’ll give you the shits to that golden nectar of the Gods… filled with all sorts of ash and whatever else was floating around the woods! It was a lot of fun, but we knew we could make the experience… and Maple Syrup… better.
A week. I figured we had a week until our second chance to do this boiling thing so there was a bit of time to find a better way. Contain the fire!… control the heat flow!… that was my goal. At first, I was gonna take some old, galvanized roofing that I had found in the woods (awe… Vermont) and make a firebox out of it where two hotel pans could sit in to increase the surface area and to limit ash and junk from getting into the syrup. As I was telling someone about this adventure and my plan for the firebox, someone else offered me a couple sheets of stainless steel to make the firebox out of!… how fortuitist!! So, over a couple of evenings, I figured out how to work with stainless steel and cobbled together our first firebox… with chimney and all! I gotta say, it’s pretty fun cutting and grinding metal, but I had that constant fear of accidentally slicing the palm of my hand off (even with gloves on!) or having a shard shred my eyeball or burning down the garage from the sparks flying as the grinder screeched through the stainless steel.
The second boil was much more efficient and productive, although enclosing the fire also meant limiting access to the heat that kept us warm as we stood there in the woods watching water (sap) boil! Honestly though, it wasn’t that cold of a day and the fact that it was taking about half the time compared to the first boil warmed us with excitement and accomplishment. Besides, all we really had to do was keep the fire going, keep adding sap, and simply enjoy each other’s company as we chatted about this and that and here and there. It was a pretty darn nice way to spend a Monday afternoon. I mean, I got to spend the morning in the garage finishing something I made to hopefully make our experience better (which was a wonderful learnin’ lesson in and of itself!), I spent the day in the woods burning shit with someone I love, and when Monday was all said and done, there were four and a half Ball jars sitting on the pie board in the kitchen filled with… MAPLE…FRICKIN’… SYRUP! (fuck… yeah!)
Widower Notes n Thoughts:
- Change always takes a bit of getting used to. It don’t matter if it’s a big change in your life like your wife dying… a small change like a detour during the morning commute or trimming your beard… or a casual one such as the changing of the seasons. Well, minus the hurricanes, tornadoes, n shit… they aren’t casual, but it’s there… “Change”… and we adapt. Ever since Kateri died, I’ve had to deal with quite a few of those Big Changes that come along with widowhood. And yup… there are some hard ones to deal with on a daily basis (even almost 6 years in), but they’ve taught me how to deal with “Change” in a much more even keeled manner than the “I’m just gonna let this thing Annette did eat at me until I snap at Frankie because he chews with his mouth open like a God Damn camel!!!” (sorry for the blasphemy… old life Darren was wound kinda tight). Now, I’m not saying that in the past almost 6 years of widowhood I’ve dealt with certain Changes, or the effects/repercussions of those Changes, in the best… some might say, “Appropriate” or “Sensitive”… ways, all I’m saying is I simply don’t react the same way as I did before because I’ve had time… and have taken the time… to reflect on how I approach and accept Change since the moment the most significant one in my life took place on April 22nd, 2018. In those almost 6 years I’ve learned some of who I am… what I want… what I need… and as I see it, there ain’t no Change that is THAT big of a deal to me these days. Things will always work out… one way or another… and I’ll be just fine as I plug away at this thing we like to call… Living. (until that changes!)
Thirty Days of Mo(u)rning 