64 ~ Welcome, Sugar Moon

March is the month God created to show people who don’t drink what a hangover is like.  ­– Garrison Keillor.

Indeed, March can be a lean time, physically and spiritually. White-tailed deer, for example, are essentially starving to death now. They’ve used up their reserves of winter fat, and have long since found and eaten the easy winter food. It’s now simply a matter of which arrives first – death, or the new growth of spring. 

For we humans, research shows that March tends to be one of the most difficult annual periods for those who struggle with bipolar.  March days when “the sky won’t snow and the sun won’t shine” can test the resilience of the best of us.   

Fortunately, March comes with a silver, or rather amber, lining. The Creator, the Big Bang or the Lords of Evolutionary Chance (not mutually exclusive options) nailed one thing beautifully: gifting us near winter’s end, just when we need it most, with the rich miracle of maple syrup. As noted in my last post, in the past couple of weeks I’ve been tapping the maples around my house, and sap is drip, drip, dripping into collection buckets as I write. It’s the rhythm section of early spring’s music.

After boiling down the sap (it takes about 30 parts of maple sap to yield 1 part syrup), it’s time to watch like a cat at a mousehole for the final transition to syrup. A few methods can be used to tell when it’s done, such as monitoring and measuring the temperature or the sugar content.  But I like the one that old-timers in the sugar shacks used - the spoon test. Dip a spoon into the bubbling elixir and hold it aloft. When a drop hangs from the spoon without falling, it’s done. Gift delivered.

Working the alchemy of sap to syrup feeds not only my spirit, but also my pride of place. Maple syrup tops apple pie as a truly American food (or rather, North American, shared with our Canadian cousins). Apples originate in central Asia, and were eaten there and in Europe centuries before Johnny Appleseed got his start. Although maple trees are circumpolar (with the greatest species diversity in Asia; I’ve seen maples in the mountains of Laos), maple syrup is made only in the US and Canada.

Two things probably explain this. One is that the best species of maple for syrup production, having sap with the highest sugar content, is endemic to northeastern North America – our fine friend the Sugar Maple, Acer saccharum. Good syrup can be made from most other species of Acer around the world, but commercial viability takes a hit with their lower sugar contents. Then too, there is no tradition of tapping maples in Europe or Asia, only in North America.  Siberians, Russians, Scandinavians and Finns have traditionally tapped birches (more just to drink the sap after a long winter than to make syrup), but for some reason never their local maples.

It was Native Americans who figured out the gift of maple, long before Europeans arrived on the continent, and the new arrivals learned it from them. The endeavor is called “sugaring” precisely because Native Americans and early settlers boiled the sap all the way down to cakes of maple sugar, for an easily transported, late winter food.  Interrupting the boil at the syrup stage, to yield more of a treat than a staple, came later, after the continent was inundated with cheaper, slave-grown cane sugar from the West Indies.

Coming precisely at the lean time, maple sugar was once a vitally important food for both natives and immigrants. One French voyageur wrote that during an entire month at this time he and his crew ate nothing else, because they had nothing else.

Some Native American tribes mark the importance of this annual gift by calling the moon of this period the Sugar Moon. And today is the full Sugar Moon of 2022, to be followed just a couple of days later (on the 20th) by the spring equinox. Call it an alignment of hope, after a long cold winter, and some long years of pandemic. 

Although I’m descended from early French settlers (my ancestor Louis Robichaud landed in Nova Scotia in 1737), maple syrup isn’t the only thing I’m eating this month. But it is the most miraculous, and comforting. I wish I could send a few jars to Kyiv (and maybe even the Kremlin, where myopic fear – and thus violence – are especially rife).

Take care at this lean time. Keep calm, and eat some comfort food. Buckwheat or cornmeal pancakes with maple syrup would be a fine start.