Apr 2, 2013

It takes a Smith and Wesson to Beat the Sugar Shack Blues

The main problem here is a feeling like I'm getting to be a liberal hippie with a Gibson knockoff strapped to my 10-speed, looking for a commune and humming something by Joan Baez while dreaming of world peace and free love achieved by  eating nuts and berries and crapping in a hole in the ground.

About the only way I can restore psychic balance is by keeping in mind that real maple syrup is getting expensive enough to attract thieves.

That justifies strapping on the SW 645 and threading my macho saddle-leather belt through the slots on the tactical magazine holder -- the one that holds my extra clips back and forth like a real 21st Century ninja rather than up and down like an old Elmer Fudd.  I'm cocked and locked on sap-bucket patrol. Come on, Maple Mob, make my day.

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It was supposed to be lower key than this. I figured two silver maple taps would get me a couple gallons of sap. I'd boil it down to two ounces and check one more thing off the bucket list.

Think about the Guinness tap in a busy Galway pub on Saturday night.

The sap ran free on Day One, and that night I reduced two gallons or so to about a pint of not-yet-syrup. Friends, that stuff is good, even at that thin stage.

So four more taps -- which produced nothing for 48 hours of wrong weather, then, today, better than eight gallons. It's all on the stove now, three burners worth in the three biggest pots I own. The crock pot is pressed into duty as a pre-heater. There's still a gallon of raw material in the refrigerator. And the taps continue to drip. I understand Mary Shelley better now.

It looks like I'll go on this way until Thursday when the weather gets wrong again and the buds get more robust. (The internet tells me  budding-tree sap sucks; the season is over.)

TBC, he says as he ambles off to put on a camo sweat shirt and dry fire his big, dangerous pistol. Whistling  Kumbayah.











2 comments:

Jac said...

Cocked and locked with a 645?

Jim said...

Good point. It's a Pavlovian phrase embedded in the head of an old 1911 shooter.