Remembering - Growing Up and Sugaring

REMEMBERING -  Growing up and sugaring!

This picture is the road leading up to our farm, the present day Von Trapp farm, on Waitsfield Common.  The snow was plowed with a mechanical giant on tracks with a V plow and wings to push the snow back, hence the near vertical snow banks separating us from the sap buckets.  My brother Dick, Howard Corliss, and Alan Richardson would gather the sap, remove the ice from the buckets (insuring your hands were always wet and cold) and climb back down to dump the sap into the holding tank pulled by our horses Tom and Jerry.

Our day would start early with chores of cleaning, watering, and feeding in the barn, then to the house for breakfast, and then off to gather sap which was a great cash crop for the farm and very important for our family income.  Lunch was often delivered to the sugarhouse where we boiled eggs in the sap and had a quick lunch before returning to our gathering duties.  Gathering sap was not just for sunny days. We worked in cold rain and snow.  I remember well breaking through the crust with each step while trying not to spill the precious sap before we delivered to the dray.

And just when darkness approached and hopefully the day was finished, we would remember we had to do the barn chores.  A quick supper, then back to the barn for the all too familiar cleaning, watering, and feeding.  Finally, the end of the day, until we entered the house and our mother would look at us and say “what about your homework?” 

The demanding necessity of those long work days followed with a tired body hunched over a school book has often made me wonder if this were the reason I never became a scholar.