Flannel Shirts and Maple Syrup

Every March, my uncle invites the whole family to his sugar shack in Vermont to help tap the maple trees and boil the sap. There are about twenty of us, ages two to eighty-one, all in flannel shirts, all sticky by lunchtime.

The kids carry buckets. The grown-ups feed the fire. My grandfather supervises from a lawn chair, offering advice that nobody follows. It takes forty gallons of sap to make one gallon of syrup, and somehow it feels like it takes forty hours of laughing, too.

At the end of the day my uncle pours hot syrup over a pan of fresh snow, and it turns into chewy maple taffy. The kids go wild. So do the adults.

We each go home with a jar. I save mine for special occasions and then use it all on a random Tuesday in April, because every jar tastes like that day.