My Love For Maple Sugar Nearly Ruined My Life
Nothing taste better to me than the sweet taste of maple syrup, which is undeniably better than cane sugar.
As spring is in full bloom now, I fully take advantage of what the maple trees on my small tenth of an acre property have to offer. It's amazing how just a total of five maple trees can not only provide much needed shade for my house during the summer months but how they can also provide me with such a sweet delicacy of maple sugar.
To harvest the maple sap, I carefully drill a short hole into each one of the tree's then insert the tap's and then set up five gallon plastic containers to collect the tree sap at each tree and wallah I'm done! Well for at least collecting the sap.
As the days get warmer, the individual tree's will produce more and more sap. About once every three days, I go outside and collect the sap from the five trees and eventually combine the total sap into a large cooking pot, where I boil it until it turns into a thick syrup.
The boiling takes a long time and produces just a little bit of maple syrup which is one of the reasons why it is so expensive to purchase.
I repeat this process every three days with collecting the sap and boiling it. This year things are just more hectic with running my 11 year-old daughter, Grace around everywhere to her activities, taking care of the house to include my husband Ted, and the insanity that has been going on at my job lately.
So when I noticed that maple syrup was cheaper than usual this year at my local grocery store, I couldn't help but not pass up on the great offer. I purchased so much maple syrup from the grocery store that I really didn't need any from my trees this year.
I really felt a sense of burden was lifted off from my shoulders for not having to worry about collecting the sap and waiting for hours and hours until the sap was boiled down into syrup.
The one thing I really regret doing was leaving the tap's in the trees where the sap just overflew the five gallon containers everyday all the way up until July. Not only was that unsightly, but it was disrespectful to the trees. My husband and I were just too caught up in our personal lives to take the 10 minutes to remove the taps from the trees.
Then the expression that "bad things happen in threes" really went into full affect when not only did I lose my job because of the lackluster economy but so did my husband. We were completely unprepared considering we both worked for our respective company's for over 10 years and we were living well beyond our means. We were barely paying our mortgage with both of us working, so the two of us being unemployed really put us in a bad position.
Then the snowball continued to tumble down the hill and got larger and larger as our central air system decided to clunk out on us in the first week of July. We couldn't even fathom to call an HVAC company to repair the cooling system because we were in such a desperation mode from not being able to pay our mortgage.
We were pretty miserable with the temperatures being in the 80's outside with no air conditioning and just relying on on one oscillating fan in the living room. My husband and I felt like total failures for not being able to provide the basic necessities for our daughter.
The one positive thing we had was our maple trees that easily brought down the temperature inside the house 20 degrees from their shade. Without their shade, then the one fan we had would just blow hot air around the house and just make it feel worse.
We got into a routine where we would each take a cool shower each night before bed to help us sleep.
I had to squint my eyes when I woke up this morning, which just seemed odd, where I never need to squint my eyes when I wake up. I felt like a kid coming out of a dark movie theater only to go outside and feel the painful affects of the bright sun
The sun seemed brighter than usual and our bedroom was much brighter than yesterday morning. Not knowing if we were experiencing some type of solar anomaly, so Ted and I went out into our backyard.
As we both looked up, Ted said "Holy Crap" as the solar system didn't amaze us but the fact that all five of our maple trees had essentially died over night and their leaves were scattered throughout our backyard.
"It's like we're stuck in the middle of the desert with no gas now" I said to Ted knowing the temperature will just get warmer and warmer as the day goes on and our house has lost its shade.
"What do we do?" Ted asked me.
"Pray for a miracle! We have no money and we're going to die of heat exhaustion now" I responded.
With the outside temperature getting close to 90 degrees, we were just baking inside the house. I didn't know the temperature inside the house but it felt like it was 200 degrees. It was so uncomfortably hot in the house that we decided to sit in my car with the air conditioning intermittently on. Ted and I, had really hit rock bottom and the sad part was that every cent of our unemployment money was going towards our mortgage payments which we were still coming up short on. We had no other choice so we swallowed our pride and went on government assistance for food.
We were all afraid to go inside the house because of the disgusting heat inside the house, so we all used our phones inside my SUV for 14 hours a day, only going inside to go to the bathroom or if I needed to cook something to then bring to the car. Ted and I were too uncomfortable to sleep in the car, but Grace would have no issue being sprawled out in the back seat, so we continued our nightly ritual of taking a shower before going to bed in the house.
The next day Ted and I were perusing through job opportunities on our phones and Grace was playing games on her phone, when we were all kept in suspense and horror when on this seemingly peaceful and calm day, the most terrifying noise echoed through the car, which was the distinctive sound of a tree falling, where we had no idea the direction the tree was going to fall but then we heard a large thud sound, then we were all thankful it didn't fall on our car.
We all got out of the car and went into the backyard to see where the tree crashed and did nothing more than scratch our heads as we saw that one of the maple trees had slammed into our house.
"Oh crap! This doesn't look good" Ted said in a discerning voice as we all stood in horror in how the approximate six story tall tree was leaning against our two story house.
At that moment something odd came over me that made me think of those countless hours that I had to watch those World War Two movies with my father as kid, where those Japanese kamikaze pilots would dive bomb themselves into an enemy target and the pilot would sacrifice his own life for his country.
"This tree intentionally did this!" I blurted out.
"What?" Ted replied.
"All five of these trees intentionally cut their season short and shed their leaves. This one tree here committed the ultimate sacrifice and killed itself!" I exclaimed.
"Mom that's crazy, trees don't know anything!" Grace chimed in.
"We still get sick from the common cold, we still get cancer with still no cure, and there's a litany of other things that scientists just don't know, so maybe these trees do know that I just left them to bleed for no good reason other than I was too lazy to remove the tap's from the trees."
"What do you suggest that we do then?" Ted asked.
"Well this one 'kamikaze' purposely showed restraint because given the size of the tree it should of tore our house in half. So let's show reverence by holding hands and bowing our hands. Then let's show further respect and go to the township and get the free compost fertilizer to put around the four remaining trees." I said.
One of the neighbors mistakenly thought we were praying to God and out of pity offered to remove the fallen tree free of charge.
The tree was removed and fortunately the house only received cosmetic damage.
We continued our nightly ritual with each of us taking showers, but afterwards we went outside under the moonlight and held hands and asked for forgiveness from the remaining trees. It was bad enough they shed their leaves and we were suffering from the lack of shade, but with Ted and I removing our homeowners insurance our house would be totally worthless if another tree decided to fall onto our house with full force or potentially harm us as well.
After an hour of being under the moonlight, we all went inside and went to bed.
"Honey come outside, come quick!" Ted said to me with excitement the next morning.
I went outside and said "oh my God as I looked up," because the four remaining maple trees went into a rapid gestational cycle, where their tree buds looked like they would turn into leaves at any time.
Surely enough in two days time, miraculously all the leaves on the trees came back, which every horticultural center I contacted from Harvard to Yale had no explanation how they rejuvenated themselves so quickly In July.
Ted and I were able to get jobs at Walmart and refinance our house. The three of us are really appreciative of the shade the trees provide us as we sit in our living room and read books while listening to classical music with the windows cracked open, because I read that trees respond well to classical music.
Credited to mtp6921
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