Watching time and the world drift by as the steam rises

CORNWALL — It’s a true seasonal gateway: When the maple sap flows, winter weather is turning to warmer, sunnier spring temps. At Ridgway Farm, Jayne Ridgway answered the phone extension in the sugarhouse last weekend, where she and her helpers were boiling sap — and were on track to meet an annual goal of 150 gallons of syrup. “We’ve had the perfect contrast of cold nights and warm days,” Ridgway said. “Right now, it looks like we are definitely going to get 150 gallons, maybe more. It will probably end next week, but we could be surprised.”As bad as winter was, the syrup season couldn’t be better. Do the two go hand in hand? At Phil Hart’s sugar shack on the top of Cherry Hill, sugaring season creates an opportunity for friends to drop in for a visit after being indoors for too long during a hard winter. It may still be cold outside, but the rustic shack, nestled up against a rise where a great dairy barn once commanded the hilltop, is cozy. Steam rises steadily from the sap boiler. A blast of welcome warmth comes every time someone opens the cast iron door below to toss more wood onto the blazing fire.Visitors are offered a taste of the season’s still-warm production, dispensed in a coffee cup. There is always food warming on an old wood stove. Children play ball outside. Beyond is a long view of the Cornwall hills.When asked, Hart will dispense wisdom gleaned from a lifetime of tapping the huge maples on the hill. How much the trees are willing to share depends not so much on the winter that just ended, as on what happened the prior autumn. Was it rainy? Were the leaves exceptionally colorful?“Photosynthesis has to happen,” Hart began, while peeling an egg hard-boiled in the sap. His wife, Joyce, reminded him that the fall foliage was not all that colorful last year.Hart shrugged, thought about the other weather factors, and decided not to hold forth any further. This season would be an anomaly. Best to just relax and be thankful for it.He talked instead about taking maple trees safely through the decades. His family has tapped most of the same trees for generations. They have already disproved the theory that older trees aren’t good for syrup; the more-than-100 trees they tap each season are too large to wrap arms around.“Some people think it hurts the trees. They will develop scarring when the old tap heals, but you just have to make sure you tap a different spot each year.”Whether it’s to provide fruit, nuts, pollen or sap for that wonderful, sticky syrup, trees are part of the food chain. Syrup-making is a staple for farmers here. It is also undertaken by others, like the Harts, for whom it is simply a part of life, as is the syrup they will share.Hart has considered in the past giving it up. But it would mean losing those few weeks of hanging out at the shack with friends, and the meditative periods.“I love coming up here first thing in the morning by myself, chopping some wood and getting the fire going,” he said.The colder days this year have meant it will be late morning or early afternoon before the sap starts dripping. Hart has been keeping the fire going until about 11 p.m. That allows plenty of time for other creative pursuits. On the edges of the steam cloud, a white-painted wall is covered with syrup-themed poetry. Artwork is mainly charcoal on scraps of wood, done by both children and adults from the neighborhood. Hart points out one of his favorites, sketched years ago by now-teenager Wilson Terrall, whose dad, Jim, was hanging out at the shack on a recent Sunday.It shows a food pyramid. Instead of the usual dairy, meats, vegetables, etc., each slot says “maple syrup” or “M. syrup,” as space permits.