Sap-Time

It was a little tree-toad that began it. In a careless moment he had come down to the bench that connects the big maple tree with the old locust stump, and when I went out at dusk to wait for Jonathan, there he sat, in plain sight. A few experimental pokes sent him back to the tree, and I studied him there, marveling at the way he assimilated with its bark. As Jonathan came across the grass I called softly, and pointed to the tree.

“Well?” he said.

“Don’t you see?”

“No. What?”

“Look I thought you had eyes!”

“Oh, what a little beauty!”

“And isn’t his back just like bark and lichens! And what are those things in the tree beside him?”

“Plugs, I suppose.”

“Plugs?”

“Yes. After tapping. Uncle Ben used to tap these trees, I believe.”

“You mean for sap? Maple syrup?”

“Yes.”

“Jonathan! I didn’t know these were sugar maples.”

“Oh, yes. These on the road.”

“The whole row? Why, there are ten or fifteen of them! And you never told me!”

“I thought you knew.”

“Knew! I don’t know anything I should think you’d know that, by this time. Do you suppose, if I had known, I should have let all these years go by oh, dear think of all the fun we’ve missed! And syrup!”

“You’d have to come up in February.”

“Well, then, I’ll come in February. Who’s afraid of February?”

“All right. Try it next year.”

I did. But not in February. Things happened, as things do, and it was early April before I got to the farm. But it had been a wintry March, and the farmers told me that the sap had not been running except for a few days in a February thaw. Anyway, it was worth trying.

Jonathan could not come with me. He was to join me later. But Hiram found a bundle of elder spouts in the attic, and with these and an auger we went out along the snowy, muddy road. The hole was bored a pair of them in the first tree, and the spouts driven in. I knelt, watching in fact, peering up the spout-hole to see what might happen. Suddenly a drop, dim with sawdust, appeared gathered, hesitated, then ran down gayly and leapt off the end.

“Look! Hiram! It’s running!” I called.

Hiram, boring the next tree, made no response. He evidently expected it to run. Jonathan would have acted just like that, too, I felt sure. Is it a masculine quality, I wonder, to be unmoved when the theoretically expected becomes actual? Or is it that some temperaments have naturally a certain large confidence in the sway of law, and refuse to wonder at its individual workings? To me the individual workings give an ever fresh thrill because they bring a new realization of the mighty powers behind them. It seems to depend on which end you begin at.

But though the little drops thrilled me, I was not beyond setting a pail underneath to catch them. And as Hiram went on boring, I followed with my pails. Pails, did I say? Pails by courtesy. There were, indeed, a few real pails berry-pails, lard-pails, and water-pails but for the most part the sap fell into pitchers, or tin saucepans, stew-kettles of aluminum or agate ware, blue and gray and white and mottled, or big yellow earthenware bowls. It was a strange collection of receptacles that lined the roadside when we had finished our progress. As I looked along the row, I laughed, and even Hiram smiled.

But what next? Every utensil in the house was out there, sitting in the road. There was nothing left but the wash-boiler. Now, I had heard tales of amateur syrup-boilings, and I felt that the wash-boiler would not do. Besides, I meant to work outdoors no kitchen stove for me! I must have a pan, a big, flat pan. I flew to the telephone, and called up the village plumber, three miles away. Could he build me a pan? Oh, say, two feet by three feet, and five inches high yes, right away. Yes, Hiram would call for it in the afternoon.

I felt better. And now for a fireplace! Oh, Jonathan! Why did you have to be away! For Jonathan loves a stone and knows how to put stones together, as witness the stone “Eyrie” and the stile in the lane. However, there Jonathan wasn’t. So I went out into the swampy orchard behind the house and looked about no lack of stones, at any rate. I began to collect material, and Hiram, seeing my purpose, helped with the big stones. Somehow my fireplace got made two side walls, one end wall, the other end left open for stoking. It was not as pretty as if Jonathan had done it, but “’t was enough, ’t would serve.” I collected fire-wood, and there I was, ready for my pan, and the afternoon was yet young, and the sap was drip-drip-dripping from all the spouts. I could begin to boil next day. I felt that I was being borne along on the providential wave that so often floats the inexperienced to success.

That night I emptied all my vessels into the boiler and set them out once more. A neighbor drove by and pulled up to comment benevolently on my work.

“Will it run to-night?” I asked him.

“No no ’t won’t run to-night. Too cold. ’T won’t run any to-night. You can sleep all right.”

This was pleasant to hear. There was a moon, to be sure, but it was growing colder, and at the idea of crawling along that road in the middle of the night even my enthusiasm shivered a little.

So I made my rounds at nine, in the white moonlight, and went to sleep.

I was awakened the next morning to a consciousness of flooding sunshine and Hiram’s voice outside my window.

“Got anything I can empty sap into? I’ve got everything all filled up.”

“Sap! Why, it isn’t running yet, is it?”

“Pails were flowin’ over when I came out.”

“Flowing over! They said the sap wouldn’t run last night.”

“I guest there don’t nobody know when sap’ll run and when it won’t,” said Hiram peacefully, as he tramped off to the barn.

In a few minutes I was outdoors. Sure enough, Hiram had everything full old boilers, feed-pails, water-pails. But we found some three-gallon milk-cans and used them. A farm is like a city. There are always things enough in it for all purposes. It is only a question of using its resources.

Then, in the clear April sunshine, I went out and surveyed the row of maples. How they did drip! Some of them almost ran. I felt as if I had turned on the faucets of the universe and didn’t know how to turn them off again.

However, there was my new pan. I set it over my oven walls and began to pour in sap. Hiram helped me. He seemed to think he needed his feed-pails. We poured in sap and we poured in sap. Never did I see anything hold so much as that pan. Even Hiram was stirred out of his usual calm to remark, “It beats all, how much that holds.” Of course Jonathan would have had its capacity all calculated the day before, but my methods are empirical, and so I was surprised as well as pleased when all my receptacles emptied themselves into its shallow breadths and still there was a good inch to allow for boiling up. Yes, Providence my exclusive little fool’s Providence was with me. The pan, and the oven, were a success, and when Jonathan came that night I led him out with unconcealed pride and showed him the pan now a heaving, frothing mass of sap-about-to-be-syrup, sending clouds of white steam down the wind. As he looked at the oven walls, I fancied his fingers ached to get at them, but he offered no criticism, seeing that they worked.

The next day began overcast, but Providence was merely preparing for me a special little gift in the form of a miniature snowstorm. It was quite real while it lasted. It whitened the grass and the road, it piled itself softly among the clusters of swelling buds on the apple trees, and made the orchard look as though it had burst into bloom in an hour. Then the sun came out, there were a few dazzling moments when the world was all blue and silver, and then the whiteness faded.

And the sap! How it dripped! Once an hour I had to make the rounds, bringing back gallons each time, and the fire under my pan was kept up so that the boiling down might keep pace with the new supply.

“They do say snow makes it run,” shouted a passer-by, and another called, “You want to keep skimmin’!” Whereupon I seized my long-handled skimmer and fell to work. Southern Connecticut does not know much about syrup, but by the avenue of the road I was gradually accumulating such wisdom as it possessed.

The syrup was made. No worse accident befell than the occasional overflowing of a pail too long neglected. The syrup was made, and bottled, and distributed to friends, and was the pride of the household through the year.

“This time I will go early,” I said to Jonathan; “they say the late running is never quite so good.”

It was early March when I got up there this time early March after a winter whose rigor had known practically no break. Again Jonathan could not come, but Cousin Janet could, and we met at the little station, where Hiram was waiting with Kit and the surrey. The sun was warm, but the air was keen and the woods hardly showed spring at all yet, even in that first token of it, the slight thickening of their millions of little tips, through the swelling of the buds. The city trees already showed this, but the country ones still kept their wintry penciling of vanishing lines.

Spring was in the road, however. “There ain’t no bottom to this road now, it’s just dropped clean out,” remarked a fellow teamster as we wallowed along companionably through the woods. But, somehow, we reached the farm. Again we bored our holes, and again I was thrilled as the first bright drops slipped out and jeweled the ends of the spouts. I watched Janet. She was interested but calm, classing herself at once with Hiram and Jonathan. We unearthed last year’s oven and dug out its inner depths leaves and dirt and apples and ashes it was like excavating through the seven Troys to get to bottom. We brought down the big pan, now clothed in the honors of a season’s use, and cleaned off the cobwebs incident to a year’s sojourn in the attic. By sunset we had a panful of sap boiling merrily and already taking on a distinctly golden tinge. We tasted it. It was very syrupy. Letting the fire die down, we went in to get supper in the utmost content of spirit.

“It’s so much simpler than last year,” I said, as we sat over our cozy “tea,” “having the pan and the oven ready-made, and all

“You don’t suppose anything could happen to it while we’re in here?” suggested Janet. “Shan’t I just run out and see?”

“No, sit still. What could happen? The fire’s going out.”

“Yes, I know.” But her voice was uncertain.

“You see, I’ve been all through it once,” I reassured her.

As we rose, Janet said, “Let’s go out before we do the dishes.” And to humor her I agreed. We lighted the lantern and stepped out on the back porch. It was quite dark, and as we looked off toward the fireplace we saw gleams of red.

“How funny!” I murmured. “I didn’t think there was so much fire left.”

We felt our way over, through the yielding mud of the orchard, and as I raised the lantern we stared in dazed astonishment. The pan was a blackened mass, lit up by winking red eyes of fire. I held the lantern more closely. I seized a stick and poked the crisp black stuff broke and crumbled into an empty and blackening pan. A curious odor arose.

“It couldn’t have!” gasped Janet.

“It couldn’t but it has!” I said.

It was a matter for tears, or rage, or laughter. And laughter won. When we recovered a little we took up the black shell of carbon that had once been syrup-froth; we laid it gently beside the oven, for a keepsake. Then we poured water in the pan, and steam rose hissing to the stars.

“Does it leak?” faltered Janet.

“Leak!” I said. I was on my knees now, watching the water stream through the parted seam of the pan bottom, down into the ashes below.

“The question is,” I went on as I got up, “did it boil away because it leaked, or did it leak because it boiled away?”

“I don’t see that it matters much,” said Janet. She was showing symptoms of depression at this point.

“It matters a great deal,” I said. “Because, you see, we’ve got to tell Jonathan, and it makes all the difference how we put it.”

“I see,” said Janet; then she added, experimentally, “Why tell Jonathan?”

“Why, Janet, you know better! I wouldn’t miss telling Jonathan for anything. What is Jonathan for!”

“Well of course,” she conceded. “Let’s do dishes.”

We sat before the fire that evening and I read while Janet knitted. Between my eyes and the printed page there kept rising a vision a vision of black crust, with winking red embers smoldering along its broken edges. I found it distracting in the extreme....

At some time unknown, out of the blind depths of the night, I was awakened by a voice:

“It’s beginning to rain. I think I’ll just go out and empty what’s near the house.”

“Janet!” I murmured, “don’t be absurd.”

“But it will dilute all that sap.”

There isnt any sap to dilute. It wont be running at night. After a while the voice, full of propitiatory intonations, resumed:

“My dear, you don’t mind if I slip out. It will only take a minute.”

“I do mind. Go to sleep!”

Silence. Then:

“It’s raining harder. I hate to think of all that sap

“You don’t have to think!” I was quite savage. “Just go to sleep and let me! Another silence. Then a fresh downpour. The voice was pleading:

“Please let me go! I’ll be back in a minute. And it’s not cold.”

“Oh, well I’m awake now, anyway. I’ll go. My voice was tinged with that high resignation that is worse than anger. Janets tone changed instantly:

“No, no! Don’t! Please don’t! I’m going. I truly don’t mind.”

“I’m going. I don’t mind, either, not at all.”

“Oh, dear! Then let’s not either of us go.”

“That was my idea in the first place.”

“Well, then, we won’t. Go to sleep, and I will too.”

“Not at all! I’ve decided to go.”

“But it’s stopped raining. Probably it won’t rain any more.”

“Then what are you making all this fuss for?”

“I didn’t make a fuss. I just thought I could slip out

“Well, you couldn’t. And it’s raining very hard again. And I’m going.”

“Oh, don’t! You’ll get drenched.”

“Of course. But I can’t bear to have all that sap diluted.”

“It doesn’t run at night. You said it didn’t.”

“You said it did.”

“But I don’t really know. You know best.”

“Why didn’t you think of that sooner? Anyway, I’m going.”

“Oh, dear! You make me feel as if I’d stirred you up

“You have,” I interrupted, sweetly. “I won’t deny that you have stirred me up. But now that you have mentioned it” I felt for a match “now that you have mentioned it, I see that this was the one thing needed to make my evening complete, or perhaps it’s morning I don’t know.”

We found the dining-room warm, and soon we were equipped in those curious compromises of vesture that people adopt under such circumstances, and, with lantern and umbrella, we fumbled our way out to the trees. The rain was driving in sheets, and we plodded up the road in the yellow circle of lantern-light wavering uncertainly over the puddles, while under our feet the mud gave and sucked.

“It’s diluted, sure enough,” I said, as we emptied the pails. We crawled slowly back, with our heavy milk-can full of sap-and-rain-water, and went in.

The warm dining-room was pleasant to return to, and we sat down to cookies and milk, feeling almost cozy.

“I’ve always wanted to know how it would be to go out in the middle of the night this way,” I remarked, “and now I know.”

“Aren’t you hateful!” said Janet.

“Not at all. Just appreciative. But now, if you haven’t any other plan, we’ll go back to bed.”

It was half-past eight when we waked next morning. But there was nothing to wake up for. The old house was filled with the rain-noises that only such an old house knows. On the little windows the drops pricked sharply; in the fireplace with the straight flue they fell, hissing, on the embers. On the porch roofs the rain made a dull patter of sound; on the tin roof of the “little attic” over the kitchen it beat with flat resonance. In the big attic, when we went up to see if all was tight, it filled the place with a multitudinous clamor; on the sides of the house it drove with a fury that re-echoed dimly within doors.

Outside, everything was afloat. We visited the trees and viewed with consternation the torrents of rain-water pouring into the pails. We tried fastening pans over the spouts to protect them. The wind blew them merrily down the road. It would have been easy enough to cover the pails, but how to let the sap drip in and the rain drip out that was the question.

“It seems as if there was a curse on the syrup this year,” said Janet.

“The trouble is,” I said, “I know just enough to have lost my hold on the fool’s Providence, and not enough really to take care of myself.”

“Superstition!” said Janet.

“What do you call your idea of the curse?” I retorted. “Anyway, I have an idea! Look, Janet! We’ll just cut up these enamel-cloth table-covers here by the sink and everywhere, and tack them around the spouts.”

Janet’s thrifty spirit was doubtful. “Don’t you need them?”

“Not half so much as the trees do. Come on! Pull them off. We’ll have to have fresh ones this summer, anyway.”

We stripped the kitchen tables and the pantry and the milk-room. We got tacks and a hammer and scissors, and out we went again. We cut a piece for each tree, just enough to go over each pair of spouts and protect the pail. When tacked on, it had the appearance of a neat bib, and as the pattern was a blue and white check, the effect, as one looked down the road at the twelve trees, was very fresh and pleasing. It seemed to cheer the people who drove by, too.

But the bibs served their purpose, and the sap dripped cozily into the pails without any distraction from alien elements. Sap doesn’t run in the rain, they say, but this sap did. Probably Hiram was right, and you can’t tell. I am glad if you can’t. The physical mysteries of the universe are being unveiled so swiftly that one likes to find something that still keeps its secret though, indeed, the spiritual mysteries seem in no danger of such enforcement.

The next day the rain stopped, the floods began to subside, and Jonathan managed to arrive, though the roads had even less “bottom to ’em” than before. The sun blazed out, and the sap ran faster, and, after Jonathan had fully enjoyed them, the blue and white bibs were taken off. Somehow in the clear March sunshine they looked almost shocking. By the next day we had syrup enough to try for sugar.

For on sugar my heart was set. Syrup was all very well for the first year, but now it had to be sugar. Moreover, as I explained to Janet, when it came to sugar, being absolutely ignorant, I was again in a position to expect the aid of the fool’s Providence.

“How much do you know about it?” asked Janet.

“Oh, just what people say. It seems to be partly like fudge and partly like molasses candy. You boil it, and then you beat it, and then you pour it off.”

“I’ve got more to go on than that,” said Jonathan. “I came up on the train with the Judge. He used to see it done.”

“You’ve got to drive Janet over to her train to-night; Hiram can’t,” I said.

“All right. There’s time enough.”

We sat down to early supper, and took turns running out to the kitchen to “try” the syrup as it boiled down. At least we said we would take turns, but usually we all three went. Supper seemed distinctly a side issue.

“I’m going to take it off now,” said Jonathan. “Look out!”

“Do you think it’s time?” I demurred.

“We’ll know soon,” said Jonathan, with his usual composure.

We hung over him. “Now you beat it,” I said. But he was already beating.

“Get some cold water to set it in,” he commanded. We brought the dishpan with water from the well, where ice still floated.

“Maybe you oughtn’t to stir so much do you think?” I suggested, helpfully. “Beat it more up, you know.”

“More the way you would eggs,” said Janet.

“I’ll show you.” I lunged at the spoon.

“Go away! This isn’t eggs,” said Jonathan, beating steadily.

“Your arm must be tired. Let me take it,” pleaded Janet.

“No, me!” I said. “Janet, you’ve got to get your coat and things. You’ll have to start in fifteen minutes. Here, Jonathan, you need a fresh arm.”

“I’m fresh enough.”

“And I really don’t think you have the motion.”

“I have motion enough. This is my job. You go and help Janet.”

“Janet’s all right.”

“So am I. See how white it’s getting. The Judge said

“Here come Hiram and Kit,” announced Janet, returning with bag and wraps. “But you have ten minutes. Can’t I help?”

“He won’t let us. He’s that ‘sot,’” I murmured. “He’ll make you miss your train.”

“You could butter the pans,” he counter charged, “and you haven’t.”

We flew to prepare, and the pouring began. It was a thrilling moment. The syrup, or sugar, now a pale hay color, poured out thickly, blob-blob-blob, into the little pans. Janet moved them up as they were needed, and I snatched the spoon, at last, and encouraged the stuff to fall where it should. But Jonathan got it from me again, and scraped out the remnant, making designs of clovers and polliwogs on the tops of the cakes. Then a dash for coats and hats and a rush to the carriage.

When the surrey disappeared around the turn of the road, I went back, shivering, to the house. It seemed very empty, as houses will, being sensitive things. I went to the kitchen. There on the table sat a huddle of little pans, to cheer me, and I fell to work getting things in order to be left in the morning. Then I went back to the fire and waited for Jonathan. I picked up a book and tried to read, but the stillness of the house was too importunate, it had to be listened to. I leaned back and watched the fire, and the old house and I held communion together.

Perhaps in no other way is it possible to get quite what I got that evening. It was partly my own attitude; I was going away in the morning, and I had, in a sense, no duties toward the place. The magazines of last fall lay on the tables, the newspapers of last fall lay beside them. The dust of last fall was, doubtless, in the closets and on the floors. It did not matter. For though I was the mistress of the house, I was for the moment even more its guest, and guests do not concern themselves with such things as these.

If it had been really an empty house, I should have been obliged to think of these things, for in an empty house the dust speaks and the house is still, dumbly imprisoned in its own past. On the other hand, when a house is filled with life, it is still, too; it is absorbed in its own present. But when one sojourns in a house that is merely resting, full of the life that has only for a brief season left it, ready for the life that is soon to return then one is in the midst of silences that are not empty and hollow, but richly eloquent. The house is the link that joins and interprets the living past and the living future.

Something of this I came to feel as I sat there in the wonderful stillness. There were no house noises such as generally form the unnoticed background of one’s consciousness the steps overhead, the distant voices, the ticking of the clock, the breathing of the dog in the corner. Even the mice and the chimney-swallows had not come back, and I missed the scurrying in the walls and the flutter of wings in the chimney. The fire purred low, now and then the wind sighed gently about the corner of the “new part,” and a loose door-latch clicked as the draught shook it. A branch drew back and forth across a window-pane with the faintest squeak. And little by little the old house opened its heart. All that it told me I hardly yet know myself. It gathered up for me all its past, the past that I had known and the past that I had not known. Time fell away. My own importance dwindled. I seemed a very small part of the life of the house very small, yet wholly belonging to it. I felt that it absorbed me as it absorbed the rest those before and after me for time was not.

There was the sound of slow wheels outside, the long roll of the carriage-house door, and the trampling of hoofs on the flooring within. Then the clinking of the lantern and the even tread of feet on the path behind the house, a gust of raw snow-air and the house fell silent so that Jonathan might come in.

“Your sugar is hardening nicely, I see,” he said, rubbing his hands before the fire.

“Yes,” I said. “You know I told Janet that for this part of the affair we could trust to the fool’s Providence.”

“Thank you,” said Jonathan.