Maple Sap Quotes

When Nanabozho, the Anishinaabe Original Man, our teacher, part man, part manido, walked through the world, he took note of who was flourishing and who was not, of who was mindful of the Original Instructions and who was not. He was dismayed when he came upon villages where the gardens were not being tended, where the fishnets were not repaired and the children were not being taught the way to live. Instead of seeing piles of firewood and caches of corn, he found the people lying beneath maple trees with their mouths wide open, catching the thick, sweet syrup of the generous trees. They had become lazy and took for granted the gifts of the Creator. They did not do their ceremonies or care for one another. He knew his responsibility, so he went to the river and dipped up many buckets of water. He poured the water straight into the maple trees to dilute the syrup. Today, maple sap flows like a stream of water with only a trace of sweetness to remind the people both of possibility and of responsibility. And so it is that it takes forty gallons of sap to make a gallon of syrup.* * Adapted from oral tradition and Ritzenthaler and Ritzenthaler, 1983.

I wasn’t sure when he’d moved closer, but his hand on the back of my neck made me startle. I looked up into his unspeakably fond eyes. I could look into those eyes forever. Sappy. Oh, God, the sap is thick enough to choke on. My lips curved upward slightly as even my inner romantic gagged. Guess I’d been suppressing my feelings for him for a long time. I should be forgiven for being sappy enough to make good maple syrup. It didn’t seem to matter whether he returned those feelings or not. Without the animosity and jealousy, I’d found there was just…Ethan. And that was the very best excavation I’d ever done.

There’s language to the woods and it’s speaking to those capable of listening, to ears taught to decode meanings mild or malignant. Geese flying, bees buzzing. Howl of a wolf, height of the clouds, face of the moon, colour of the night and the morning sky, movement of game, snowfall heavy or light — things mostly lost on most people. Where others heard the winds in the maples, the trapper smelled the sap on the breeze. A wind veered northerly and where another might think the evening cold, he knew frost was coming early and the temperatures would stay cold for a week and the bears would feed heavily before the berry bushes died and the deer would be more active at dusk, at dawn. Inflections of the forest, cadence of the wilderness, language of the North.

And lifting water is just one of the many jobs that the phloem, xylem, and cambium perform. They also manufacture lignin and cellulose; regulate the storage and production of tannin, sap, gum, oils, and resins; dole out minerals and nutrients; convert starches into sugars for future growth (which is where maple syrup comes into the picture); and goodness knows what else. But because all this is happening in such a thin layer, it also leaves the tree terribly vulnerable to invasive organisms. To combat this, trees have formed elaborate defense mechanisms. The reason a rubber tree seeps latex when cut is that this is its way of saying to insects and other organisms, “Not tasty. Nothing here for you. Go away.” Trees can also deter destructive creatures like caterpillars by flooding their leaves with tannin, which makes the leaves less tasty and so inclines the caterpillars to look elsewhere. When infestations are particularly severe, some trees can even communicate the fact. Some species of oak release a chemical that tells other oaks in the vicinity that an attack is under way. In response, the neighboring oaks step up their tannin production the better to withstand the coming onslaught. By such means, of course, does nature tick along. The problem arises when a tree encounters an attacker for which evolution has left it unprepared, and seldom has a tree been more helpless against an invader than the American chestnut against Endothia parasitica. It enters a chestnut effortlessly, devours the cambium cells, and positions itself for attack on the next tree before the tree has the faintest idea,

Long past the first official day of spring on the calendar, old man winter slowly loosened his icy grip on the Lanark County farmlands. We waited and watched for the tell-tale signs, hoping that the mercury in the old thermometer would being to move in the right direction. Even as the sap began to drip slowly from our beloved maple trees, the bitter winds blew relentlessly from the north.

As unbelievable as it sounded to Fred, they thought it was just one big carnival. They didn’t come uptown for the maple stirs, didn’t care about the syrup producers’ contest or participants, didn’t like the queen contest, didn’t watch the bathtub race or the parades, and were negative in all aspects. When they looked at the square from the outside, it was only a cheesy carnival. If they would or could have viewed the festival from the inside, they would have seen a community celebration of the end of snow, the coming of green leaves and plants and shrubs, the flow of maple sap, the change from sap to syrup, the transition from winter to spring. They would have seen their neighbors walking their children uptown for a stir, for a turn on the Dragon Ride, telling their children to slow down; they could watch the high-school bands

My dear Sugar Maple, We're tapping the trees, boiling sap down for syrup and hard candy. I like you to know, with my words in your mouth, the places and ways in which I think of you. It feels good to be reciprocal; eat this part of me while I drive reeds into the depth of you, spill out something sweet.

Shelley just stood there. A trickle of blood ran from his split lip like heavy sap from a tapped maple tree. Did he even notice, or care? The empty vaults of his eyes filled with vaporous white, reflecting the lightning that flashed over the bluffs. They became the glass eyes of a toy clown.

Familiar songbirds reappear, perched high above the stark white landscape in those final frigid days of February and March. Their long-awaited songs announce a return to sunny days, with nights still cold enough to freeze in that delicate balance of those elusive few weeks when the sap will run.

On those crisp late winter days, when temperatures drop below freezing at nightfall, then rise once again in a sunny spring thaw you'll find them there. Three generations will be tapping, gathering, and boiling the sap, including some from the same faithful trees that towered over the property long before their ancestors arrived from northwestern Ireland.

For most Canadians warmer days and melting snow signals the end of winter, but for those of us who grew up in Lanark County the very first sign of spring was seeing galvanized buckets hanging from the sides of maple trees.

Lies are complicated, Ivy. The truth is easy. It flows like maple sap on a warm spring day.

It is said that our people learned to make sugar from the squirrels. In late winter, the hungry time, when caches of nuts are depleted, squirrels take to the treetops and gnaw on the branches of sugar maples. Scraping the bark allows sap to exude from the twig, and the squirrels drink it. But the real goods come the next morning, when they follow the same circuit they made the day before, licking up the sugar crystals that formed on the bark overnight. Freezing temperatures cause the water in the sap to sublimate, leaving a sweet crystalline crust like rock candy behind, enough to tide them over through the hungriest time of year.