Some years ago my wife and I drove to the new visitor’s center at the Aaronic Priesthood Restoration Site. Just past the parking lot was a stand of trees where, a sign said, John the Baptist conferred the Aaronic Priesthood upon Joseph Smith and Oliver Cowdery. The sign also noted that the grove of trees was a “sugarbush.” I had always imagined their praying on the bank of the Susquehanna, where they baptized each other. I was not only surprised but excited. I couldn’t think of a more wonderful place to restore the priesthood than in a grove of maple trees.
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Maple syrup wasn’t in grocery stores when I was a boy, but I have fond memories of Log Cabin Syrup. It came in a tin container, shaped and painted like a log cabin, with a lid on the top of the chimney. It was the only syrup I knew of until we moved to Syracuse, New York, when I was fifteen.
That autumn my family drove to Vermont one Saturday to see the leaves. Many of the forests in Vermont are comprised largely of sugar-maple trees. In the fall, their leaves turn a bright reddish-orange. We could have found similar forests in central New York, but the sight was well worth the drive. The foliage was spectacular.
We stopped at a store for tourists, that sold, among other things, maple syrup. The clerk told us there were two grades, A and B. He let us taste both. “There’s nothing wrong with grade B,” he said. “It’s darker and has a hardier flavor. Many people prefer it.”
I tasted grade B. It was wonderful. Then I tried grade A. It had a light, subtle flavor. I prayed that I’d never have to pour Log Cabin on my waffles again.
A decade later I married a woman who grew up on a farm in central New York. On one of my visits to her parent’s farm, she told me that the grove of maple trees on a hill a quarter of a mile behind the farmhouse was called a sugarbush. The term was new to me.
I was a birder then, and on our frequent visits to the farm, I spent much of my time tramping about with a pair of binoculars. The sugarbush was a favorite spot. Some half dozen species of warblers bred there. They are beautiful, colorful birds, yet most people don’t know they exist. I watched them flit about the branches of the maple trees.
But a sugar bush is more than a source of sweetness and a place of beauty.
Winters in central New York are long and harsh. Snow often starts in October, always by the end of November. Winter sometimes continues through April. Warm weather seldom comes before the middle of May and its arrival is sudden. When it does come, I always feel a spiritual resurgence. Life has once again triumphed over death.
One year I was at the farm when my father-in-law made maple syrup. The sap runs when the temperature dips below freezing at night yet is above thirty-two degrees in the day. So while we collected the sap in late winter, there were few signs of spring. It still froze at night. And there was still snow—lots of snow. Modern syrup producers use plastic tubing to connect the trees to a central vat, but my father-in-law gathered it the old-fashioned way. We drove around the farm on a wagon pulled by a tractor and collected the sap in milk cans. Then we boiled it down outside in a large rectangular vat.
Sugaring off gets you working outdoors earlier than you normally would. It is a harbinger of spring. It lifts your spirits; it restores your soul. It was one of the most pleasant things I ever did in my life. I went back to graduate school, and weeks of slopping through late snow. But I had defied winter. I had beat it.
Edward Hogan is a retired mathematics professor.
