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Syrup
by John Sheirer |
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John teaches at Asnuntuck Community College in Enfield, Connecticut. He is the author of a collection of poems, Saying My Name: Selected Poems, 1982-2002, and a book of essays, Free Chairs. He is currently completing a memoir, Growing Up Mostly Normal in the Middle of Nowhere. The fall that I turned ten, Dad decided to make maple syrup. He bought a book on how to go about tapping the trees, and he was as excited about the project as I’d ever seen him. We had plenty of maple trees, and Dad had a good time carving and drilling the wooden taps out of branches. He hung dozens of buckets around the farm and collected gallons of sap that he poured into two enormous pressure cookers that my mom usually used for canning. These things held about ten gallons of liquid and cost $35 each, a huge sum back then. Dad placed the cookers on our outside fireplace and got a very hot fire going to boil the sap down into syrup. After about an hour, I heard a very loud sizzle from the fireplace and called for Dad to come out of the house. Just as he arrived, we heard a second sizzle. Right away, Dad realized what had happened. His roaring fire had burned through most of the old iron stovetop and the bottom of the two expensive pressure cookers, releasing the sap into the flames below. Dad had lost all of the sap he’d gathered, two of Mom’s most expensive kitchen tools—and his taste for maple syrup. After the incident, we never tapped a tree again, and Dad sweetened his pancakes with apple butter. |
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