Departing Winter

We thought it was over -- the sugaring, sugarbush, syrup season.

The temps had risen until they no longer dropped below freezing at night. Warm days, frozen nights are required for the rise and fall of sap beneath the skin of Maple Tree. It is this movement that allows the clear liquid to trickle or gush from the hole drilled through the tree bark, then tapped with a simple stile or spigot.

Learned from this continent's first people, this sugaring time is a demanding but treasured tradition for many. There are ways to run larger operations smoothly with networks of tubing, but for many there is the hauling or sledding of buckets of collected sap through the snowy transitioning woods. There is the sitting at steaming evaporator tub heated over outdoor fire (You must boil down 40 gallons of sap to get one gallon of syrup). There is the chill, discomfort, and brittle starry sky. There is the sound of darkness. There is the periodic sip of sap -- tasting the increasing sweetness as more water evaporates skyward. There is - in a group operation - the sharing of story and food. There is in a one-person operation (like my spouse Jeff's) solitude and wondering time.

Then there is the finishing. This is the carefully supervised last stage of heating. It yields the amber or brown thick sweetness that delights and touches us with winter-into-spring giftings through the rest of the year. The intense effort calls forth visceral gratitude with each serving even months later.

Days of round-the-clock hauling and boiling take their toll. There is sadness and relief when you finally pull the taps from the trees and wash your buckets.

Near 60 degree temps had many sugaring folks pulling taps and ending the season. Jeff hadn't yet gotten to that on his to-do list when temps dropped again and snow spread itself out over the mud. The still-hanging buckets overflowed with sap; some dropped to the ground under the weight and fullness.

This season calls forth a lovely musing by writer Robin Wall Kimmerer in her book "Braiding Sweetgrass." She brings her identities as mother, educator, scientist, and member of the Potawatomi Nation to bear with crack-me-open beauty on the natural world and life. Dr. Wall Kimmerer relates watching her young daughters lap sap from the small stile protruding from Maple -- blissful as the drops land on their tongues. She shares how it brings to mind breastfeeding her once infant daughters, now nursed by Earth.

The stickiness of heated sap binds many images together.

Nourishment, delight, blessing, healing (sap is medicinal) emerging from a small wound in a tree. For those followers of the story of this Christian Holy Week, there is the reminder of wounds in the Jesus body and what poured from them. In the Hebrew Passover story, there is recall of the protection offered by blood from a lamb's wound.

There is also my memory of a fall into a deep hole with my six-month-old son when we were on a north-country road trip. When Jeff rescued us, Baby Boy was screaming, his face bloodied. As frightened young parents, upon discovering that blood was pouring from his mouth, we called the nearest emergency room. It was an hour away.

"Will he nurse?" the doctor asked.

Pressed to my body, Hurt Child latched on, quieted, and suckled.

"Ah, then he'll be ok," Doctor said. He assured me we could wait to visit our own doctor when we returned home the next week.

There is this knowing that breastfeeding covers and repairs the vulnerabilities of a newborn with the early mother's milk: colostrum.

There is the knowing that the life-giving and reparative bonding of skin-to-skin, baby heartbeat against mama heartbeat is part of the milk and nourishment.

There is the knowing that this repairs Mama, too. The physical ache for the newborn. The wounded place stretched, perhaps torn or cut, by Baby's exit/entrance. The pushed-beyond-belief ligaments and skin.

***** *****

Wound-holes are opened, stressed, tenderized with the start of a highly scrutinized Minneapolis trial. This trial replays images that horrified, traumatized, and enraged a world around the specter of racial violence. These images detonated centuries of compressed fear and injustice.

What to do with these wound-holes in our souls and so many of our bodies! Might they leak something honest, just, caring, reparative?

We are in pandemic time. A season of vaccine alongside the rise of sickness counts still asks for caution... distance...

We are in great-division time.

How can this time hold depictions of the deep physicality of mutual repair and nourishment by proximity of heart and skin?

Perhaps in the pressing up against the body of Earth, also wounded and reparative, yet universal in its connection to each body.

Perhaps in the pressing into each other's stories and the discomfort of being in each other's wounded places.

Perhaps in the giving of attention and acknowledgement to our own wounds.

Perhaps in the examination of what trickles from our own wounds; in the painful boiling off of excess until there is an amber concentrate of wisdom, compassion, longing, and call to action.

Perhaps we carry it forth, this precious hard-earned offering from our wounded lives. Perhaps pouring it into the open hurt mouths of our children, and sharing it tentatively at glimpses of vulnerable hungers. Perhaps the sticky messiness of this costly wound-stuff adheres us to this world until we struggle and love it enough to repair us all.

~rmlaroche©2020 www.DiasporaOnMadeline.com