The Dirty Life.On Farming, Food, and Love by Kristin Kimball

Author:Kristin Kimball [Kimball, Kristin]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Scribner
Published: 2010-10-11T23:00:00+00:00

Sugar bush. Even the words are pretty and sweet. From up on the hill, through the bare trees, I could see each field and pasture framed by its hedgerow, all the way to the lake a mile away. The farmhouse was the warm color of Jersey cream against the blue-white snow, all its rough edges smoothed, like an aging beauty flattered by candlelight. Inside the sugar bush the snow muted the rustle of beech leaves and the clink of the harnesses and our voices, and standing still with the horses I felt like an interloper in nature’s bedroom.

The sun was warm, but the snow was deep and heavy, and the horses labored to break a trail, their weight shifted to their back ends, forelegs reaching high. They still had their winter coats, and they were soon soaked with sweat. When we broke through drifts the snow came up and over the front of the jumper to where I sat, like waves over the prow of a ship. The jumper was stacked with buckets and their tops, and a box of thin metal spiles.

Making a sugar bush is a process of elimination. Over years and generations the ash and pine and birch are logged out, leaving a monopoly on sunlight and nutrients for the sugar maples. Unrestricted, the trunks of the old trees grow so big you can’t wrap your arms halfway around them, and the tops spread and unfold into the open, elegant, vaselike shapes that children draw when they draw trees in kindergarten. The Springs, who had owned the farm until the 1980s, were the last family to use these woods, and they’d made a good road that cut the sugar bush in half, north to south, and another that ran uphill, east to west, forming a long-armed cross. There was a rougher road that curved between the arms of the cross, through the southeast quadrant, where the population of maples was thickest and the slope steepest. Five years earlier, the sugar bush had been ravaged by a monumental ice storm that had crippled the North Country for a week. Some of the maples had been snapped off at the top or stripped of their biggest limbs. Mark and I had spent a few afternoons clearing logs from the roads, nipping back errant branches so the horses could pass without getting whipped in the eye. Mark was so geeky about trees that when he was young he collected leaves and twigs, labeled them, and put them in photo albums. He had tagged the maples with bright pink ribbon, pointing out their opposite branching, each limb and branch and twig mirrored by a twin, a trait shared, he said, only by ash and dogwood; the bark of the younger sugar maples was the smooth gray of elephant skin, thickened into overlapping scales on the older ones.

Mark struggled from tree to tree through drifts to his knees. He drilled a five-sixteenths-inch hole into the tree, angled up just slightly, so that the sap would drip out.

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