A Sound You Should Hear

Rye’s sugaring rig, circa ’14

I drove up from Connecticut on Friday night in our new-to-us truck, a 25-year old Ford F250 fresh out of Arizona, its body as rustless as the day it rolled off the factory line. It’d been a hell of a day; I’d ridden to Boston with Pen and the boys on their way to visit Penny’s mother, then hopped a bus over to Hartford, then cooled my heels for three hours waiting for the seller to get off work, then steered the old brute into the teeth of a late winter storm, a three-and-a-half hour drive made into nearly six hours by the weather.

The snow was minor but snot-slick, and I passed no fewer than a half-dozen accidents along my journey up Interstate 91, including one particularly disturbing six-car pileup. I let my eyes wander over the twisted metal until they landed on the sight of a rescue crew cutting into the compressed passenger compartment of a turned-over sedan. I averted my gaze and could not help wondering at the things we have come to accept.

It is spring now, or ostensibly so. The cold remains penetrating. Zero this morning, and the wind gusting out of the north. The snowpack is undiminished. The maple trees are frozen, holding tight to their sap, while the sugar makers fret and pace. In deference to all we have on our plates, we tapped only a handful of trees this year, just enough for a bit of “spring tonic,” the fresh sap we’ll make into tea or drink straight from the bucket. We’ve had but one small run thus far.

Yesterday I consolidated the remaining square bales, as much for the work of it as anything else. We have plenty of hay. Well, maybe not “plenty,” but certainly enough. It was cold in the barn but windless, and I broke a sweat.

I feel a bit in limbo, caught between the weather and everything that needs doing. We are keeping ourselves busy – cleaning and re-cleaning, organizing, sketching plans, accumulating materials, jettisoning all the things we will no longer have room for and never really needed to begin with. The home we will build this summer will be less than half the size of this one, and it will not have a basement. There can be nothing extraneous. We will, quite literally, need to reduce our material possessions by 50% or more. If I had to guess, I’d say we’re at the 30% mark. Which means we’re getting to the hard stuff; yesterday, I dismantled a wooden box Fin made for me (birthday? I can’t quite remember, but probably) many years ago, all odd angles and bent-over nails. I pulled the nails, fed the wood to the fire, felt a small ache of sentiment as the flames jumped.

Still. You know what it feels like to be well on your way to dispensing with half your belongings? It feels like a good sweat on a cold day. It feels like the first day of spring – not calendar spring, but real spring, 50-degrees or more, the sun high and strong, the maples finally letting go. Plink. Plink. Plink. The sound of sap into buckets. That’s a good sound. That’s a sound you should hear.