… from my weekend at home:
The big maple-tapping “festival” was going on at the end of my street. I love it when I’m home to see it, and please don’t ask me why. It’s just a bunch of maple trees in a field, and they all have silver cans jutting off of the trunks, and you see bundled-up people walking around, carrying buckets to and fro. It just has such a jolly busy Santa’s-elves feel to it. The “maple-tappers” are a tradition (and yes, in a kind of Puncsatawney way … but I love that.) Local news trucks come out and do stories, stuff like that. I had forgotten it was going on, so when my mother and I drove by, I didn’t know at first what the crowd was. Then we saw all the containers attached to all the trees … and light dawned on us.
It was a grey day, a bit wintry, with drifts of old snow in the corners of the brown fields, the centuries-old stone walls everywhere you looked, bare tall trees with big silver bucket-things on the sides of them, bundled-up people … the maple trees were being tapped. Life is beautiful!
I noticed that too when I was driving through Kingston on Saturday morning – I love that sight…
I love maple-tapping time. Somewhere inside me is a Pa Ingalls screaming to get out and build a log house. I’d be murdered in my sleep if ever I brought home a butter churn, though.