Japheth
The first signs of spring were coming to Vermont. The nights were still freezing, but during the day the thermometer was creeping above thirty-two, which meant that it was time to start harvesting sap from my two-hundred tree maple sugarbush.
Two years ago, I had upgraded to all modern equipment. I had replaced the nostalgic hanging buckets with modern plastic tubing attached to a vacuum system which pulled all the sap down the hill to the maple shack, where a reverse osmosis machine reduced the water from the sap before it went into a modern evaporator to boil down into the sweet, sticky maple syrup.
The equipment saved me hundreds of hours of labor over the sugaring season, but there was still a tremendous amount of work to be done in a very short time. The lines had to be
