Renewing Relationships

Sitting in a small cabin with a wood stove blazing and pans of maple sap evaporating gave me lots of time to think.  Through the windows I could see the snow falling as squalls came off of Georgian Bay.  Outside, was the damp of late winter and the ice of melting days and freezing nights.  But inside we were really warm and peaceful.  This was the first sap that my partner had collected this year.  The aluminum pans were gently “hummering” on the wood stove, making the same sound as my tea kettle does on the kitchen stove. The water vapour rose gently from the bubbling sap and condensed on the windows.

In a few days, on March 20^th, it would be the Spring Equinox.  On that same day, the full moon would be called the Sugar Moon in the Anishinaabe calendar.  As I thought about cyclical time, we had come around to spring again, or it had come around to us.  We were renewing our relationship with the Maple trees.  The sap was from the three Sugar Maples in the yard.  The wood burning was from a Maple tree that a friend had to cut down.  We had picked up the logs last winter and stored the wood for a year now. It burned well.

I thought about how the Maple leaves had used their chlorophyll to capture the energy of the sun and how they had used that energy to split off electrons in order to create glucose from carbon dioxide and water, releasing oxygen in the process.  I had learned about the process in Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer.   The glucose had been stored in the tree’s roots as starch all winter.  Now, as the days became longer, the photosensors in the tree buds put out a hormonal call to the roots to create amylase, the enzyme that breaks starch down into glucose again.  This rising sugar level would have drawn water into the tree roots and on days when the sun warmed the tree bark, this sugary sap rose up to the buds, bringing the energy they needed to grow and expand and eventually create new leaves that will produce glucose once again.  We humans are sharing in this spring rising that the trees are generously providing.  We drink some of this sweetwater as a spring tonic and boil most of it down to produce syrup. As Robin Wall Kimmerer writes in Braiding Sweetgrass, our gratitude is the reciprocity for this gift.  It is important to acknowledge this as we renew our relationship once again.

As I watched the water evaporate from the pans, I remembered that these water molecules had fallen from clouds as rain, soaked into the earth and were now being drawn up by the roots of the tree into the trunk, where they came through the spiles, into the buckets and into the sugar shack.  These water molecules were now rising as water vapour back into the air.  Every time we opened the door, they escaped back into the sky, or condensed in the cold onto the snow where they may rest as a solid before melting and evaporating again.  This ancient cycle was being carried out before my eyes.

I thought about how as we age, our experiences go through a similar cycle.  I thought about raising my four children.  The memories of all the meals cooked and cleaned up from, all the diapers changed, all the clothes washed and the floors swept all kind of evaporate.  Even the frustrations felt, the patience spent and the tears shed all disappear.   Every now and then I would get up and scoop some foam off of the top of the pans.  We had already filtered the sap through a pillowcase to capture any impurities.  I thought about the memories that had to be released, people forgiven, injuries healed.  In the end we had a thick sweet syrup which is precious.  We will celebrate it on pancakes.  We will bring this liquid sunlight into our bodies and feel grateful for the gift, for the sweetness that has been distilled from the work of the leaves.  And if we sift through our memories and choose which ones to keep and which ones to let go, we can be grateful for the sweetness that our other relationships have created.  Perhaps we have to let the everyday water evaporate, filter out impurities and scoop off the foam.  We do after all narrate our own stories to ourselves all the time.  We get to choose what we highlight and recall and what we choose to let go of.  Some people call this remembering what truly matters.

This is what I came to, as I renewed my relationship again this spring with the Maples.  This is the wisdom distilled from my years, that rose to me as I paused from the business of my life to watch the sap evaporate in our little cabin under the Sugar Maples.  I breathed in the warm steamy air and I breathed out carbon dioxide that will be used in producing more sugar.  I breathed out gratitude for the trees and I rested in the cycles that carry us all.

Robin Wall Kimmerer (2013) “ Maple Sugar Moon” in Braiding Sweetgrass.  Minneapolis: Milkweed Editions.