Photos & Text: Maria Moore

Presidents’ Day is traditionally the time of the year when maple trees are tapped and the sap is collected to be boiled down into maple syrup. With the warm weather this year, plastic tubing is already in evidence, strung from maple tree to maple tree, sometimes for hundreds of yards alongside our country roads until the tubing ends in large, plastic collection tanks. Modern, clean and very efficient.

Here and there, though, you can still catch sight of a metal bucket, collecting sap the old-fashioned way. A metal tap is driven into the trunk and a metal bucket is hung underneath to catch the sap as it drips from the spout, drop by drop, into the bucket.

And if you’re really lucky, as I was the other day, you’ll come across a whole cluster of metal buckets, hanging from the trunks of maples. Coming across this scene on Niles Road, I parked my car and wandered along, taking photos of the trees, each with multiple buckets hanging from their trunks. And in the background was the steady dripping of sap, falling from the spout against the metal side and sliding down into the the pool inside. And once filled, to be collected and boiled and bottled up for use. A sweet time of the year.