That’s a maple moon up there in the sky tonight. A maple moon caught in the bare branches of the sap tree. A maple moon set in the dark blue velvet of the winter night sky.
A maple moon means that the trees are waking from their winter sleep, their sweet sap starting to flow. Winter is starting to amble out the door; spring is coming in.
The maple moon calls us, wherever we are, me and Buddy and Dad, and sometimes Sissy, when she can pull herself away from whatever life she is trying to live. Because a maple moon means that it is time to tap the trees and make syrup.
We head up north to Uncle Bear’s place in New York in Dad’s old Ford truck. The dented doors are gray, faded from the glossy Nile Blue I remember from my childhood. The white pinstripe that runs across it is faded, too, and peeling.
Buddy pushes the front seat forward, climbs in the back seat and sets his backpack and his bright orange sleeping bag across the seat, staking his claim. He pulls out a stack of dog-eared Car and Driver magazines, plugs in his ear phones.
I slide across the front seat and sit next to Dad, take out my crossword puzzle and set my Big Gulp between my knees. Sissy settles her skirts — layers of coral ruffles over a mimosa tulle petticoat and striped tights — beside me. Her battered suitcase is in back, in the camper. She sits in a circle of silence as she pulls her plaid flannel coat tight across her chest and fingers the beads on her bracelet.
When the maple moon calls, we answer. We trudge through the snow drifted high to Uncle Bear’s sugar shack. Buddy splits fat wedges of wood and feeds them into the fire underneath the boiler. Dad runs the lines right before dawn, checking and cleaning and fixing, making sure that the clear sap will flow through the white plastic tubes and collect in the boiler. Sissy and I stay in the hot shack, the air smoky with vapor as we stir the thickening syrup as it boils gently in rolling bubbles. We peel off jackets, sweaters, long-sleeve shirts down to faded T-shirts. Sissy’s skirts wilt. The sugar shack is a sauna, an oasis of heat and steamy vapor in the snowy woods.
The maple moon, full now, is high in the night sky when we finish the boiling. We open the door, and the air is sharp and dry, a relief after the heat of the shack. We stumble over the frozen ruts of the driveway to the truck parked beside Uncle Bear’s house. Dad and Buddy settle up front in the cab of the truck. Sissy and I sleep huddled in our sleeping bags in the camper, a thick wool blanket shared between us. The light of the maple moon slants through the slats of the camper’s narrow windows. It pools on my blanket. I cup the light in my hands and hold a memory of another maple moon.
It was a maple moon when Mama left. That bright moon outlined the bare trees and cast long shadows as she walked down the side of the road, away from the truck in the track of its headlights, away from us, and disappeared into the woods.
You can visit Pat's personal blog here:
http://zencrafting.blogspot.com/
You can visit Pat's personal blog here:
http://zencrafting.blogspot.com/
