I have a secret lust for urban pleasures.  My friend Alexa is child-free in San Francisco, and I live vicariously through her city life.  She blogs about cocktails, cardio strip-tease, parties with fire-eaters and burlesque shows, and dancing till dawn at disco clubs.

Alexa’s life gives me an infusion of fantasy, better than a bubble bath and a juicy novel.  Here I am in March in Vermont, hauling my toddler through the mud in my muck-boots, and she’s sporting a blue silk mini-dress at an Asian Fusion Drag Bar.  She’s my alter ego, although she doesn’t know it.

Last week, Alexa and her husband flew to New York to meet with her agent.  They dined at Pure Food and Wine, a vegan restaurant that serves raw haute cuisine.  Alexa wore a glittery silver tank and drank a Jasmine Kiss sake cocktail.  Then she ordered a White Light-ini, cloudy unfiltered sake infused with lemongrass and ginger.

The entire meal was raw, plant-sourced, and exquisitely presented– the polar opposite (she said) of eating a fatty piece of meat on a stick.  Alexa woke in the middle of the night in her hotel and felt washed clean, like there was nothing at all in her colon.

Most of the Pure clientele were sleek Manhattan women, but the waiters were all dark-eyed young men, probably Brazilian models, circling the room with quiet intensity.  My friend savored her passion-fruit tart and enjoyed the eye candy.

Meanwhile, up north in my world, the toddler had a pee accident on her flower fairy.  We endured an epic four-day snowstorm and turned the corner into Mud Season.  Our driveway thawed into a slop of brown puddles, and I gave up mopping the kitchen floor for another month.

In New York, Boston, and especially San Francisco, people are sheltered from the full onslaught of winter.  Their concrete landscape may be free of mud, but they don’t get to see spring up close, like a hand in front of the face.  And they don’t get to experience sugaring.

mud, glorious mud

Yesterday my husband and I piled our girls into the cab of his pick-up and drove through deep mud-ruts to our friends’ farm.  We were delivering sap to their sugarhouse, trading our harvest for their finished maple syrup at a ratio of 60 gallons to one.

The Amazonian mud oozed thick and rich as the 4WD spun.  We parked and squelched out in our boots, each holding a small child in our arms. If we put the girls down, they might get sucked into the mud and disappear.

Woodsmoke and sweet steam poured from the sugarhouse, and Will, the strapping young farmer, emerged from the white swirl to meet us.  His children and their cousins were roaming free– playing on the woodpile, exploring the snowy woods, splashing in the stream.

“You’ll have to excuse us,” said Will, running a sweaty hand across his forehead.  “We’re like a bunch of Abenakis at Sugar Camp.  We haven’t seen civilization in a week.”

Indeed, they did look a bit gritty and wild-eyed, their hair matted with smoke and sugar.  Will fed the gaping maw of the woodstove that fueled the evaporator, piling huge slabs of hemlock and birch into the embers.  Up back in the sugarhouse loft, an immense tank sat trickling full of cold sap– clear water from the veins of maple trees.

I sat with the girls on the woodpile while Tim hauled buckets from the back of the truck, pouring our sap into the deep tank.  Sap is one of the only plant crops you harvest as a liquid (without killing the plant).  A good sap run needs cold nights below freezing, warm days of high pressure.  The farm cousins showed me their secret trick– they open their mouths on the sap-line and let it run straight in.

Before we left, Will served us a paper cup of fresh syrup, boiled down at 219 degrees Farenheit.  The warm amber tasted like a magic elixir, more pure than anything a restaurant could offer.  A golden cocktail from the March gods, I took a sip and passed the cup to my daughters.  It was Ava’s dream come true, permission to consume liquid sugar.  Her eyelashes fluttered in pleasure as she drank.

But my mate doesn’t condone the likening of syrup to mere sugar.  “As a Vermonter, I believe maple syrup is our most beautiful product,” he told me.  “It should be a staple.  We should drink it and use it- use it like a Frenchman drinks Bordeaux.”

This year, Tim put 14 taps into our old sugar maples, a process that captivated the girls.  They like to check the buckets daily, dip in their cups and sip the cold, sweet sap.

I set aside my urban envy like a worn-out skirt.  I won’t be jetting to the city for a $20 Cosmo or a gourmet meal, but I can walk out my front door and drink a free delicacy.  Fresh sap tastes of spring water with a hint of maple– it tastes of wind and woods and snowmelt.

To try it, you need a tree, a drill, a tap, and a bucket.  A hands-on project for the whole family, backyard sugaring recalls the slower-paced Vermont of 200 years ago.  As if by magic, the season is turning, and we can taste it.

Tags:   maple sugaring · maple syrup · mud season · Pure Food and WineNo Comments