Each year, a few weeks before the spring issue of WMH arrives in mailboxes, my family starts to look at the temperature. At just the right dip in the mercury (cold nights, warmer days), we tap our front-yard silver maple. Tapping and gathering take a couple of weeks; then comes boiling, which takes almost as long but feels longer. On syruping days, my husband loves to sit outside and watch the fire, whose massive heat condenses the thin sap into syrup over several hours, the water evaporating into mist as the sugar content thickens. At most, we’ll end up with four pints of syrup, but any number of incidents might lead to lesser yield. The first year, I thought the liquid in the buckets was rainwater from a recent storm,…
