Milkweed Ladies Read Online Free PDF

on the mantel struck the hours; but time, as we deeply knew it, was hitched to the circle of the year. It was the old peasant calendar, turning with the earth, from winter to spring, to summer, to autumn, back to winter again.
    In the late winter season of freezing nights and thawing days, when water began to sing under the ice, and patches of bare ground opened on the south slope, we had “sugar-makin'” in the Woodland-up-the-Hollow. There on the wooded slope stood the sugar orchard, the scattered maple trees that Captain Jim had forbidden to the loggers; and we would set up our sugar camp in the hollow beside the little spring-fed run.
    Before the sugar water began to run, we kids, Ward and Elizabeth and I, would get the sugar wood. We would go up on the woodland slope and drag and roll down thewindfalls and dead limbs. It was cold and back-tearing work to grab the big end of branches two or three times my size and pull them downhill through the openings of the trees, sweeping behind me snow and dirt and leafy piles. Ward and Elizabeth could wrestle even bigger loads and roll big logs down to hold the fire. It took a lot of wood to boil down sugar water, and there was an old saying: “For a barrel of water, a rick of wood; for a jar of molasses, to boil them good.” When dusk came down into the hollow, our work would be done. With our faces and hands scratched, our mittens sodden, and our gum shoes squeaking, we plodded home toward lamplight, hot supper, and our homework for school.
    When the sugar thaw came, Mama and Granny Fanny would help us drag our sugar-making gear up-the-hollow: bundles of sumac spiles (spouts), two black kettles, the sawhorses, and the sugar buckets. On a flat below the spring were two sturdy forked posts set deep in the ground, and across them lay a heavy sapling set in the crotches of the posts and fastened with baling wire. On this crosspiece we hung our black chains and pot hooks and hoisted up the two big sugar kettles. Up in the woods, Mama traveled from sugar tree to sugar tree with the brace and bit. She would pick a new spile-placeunder each of the biggest limbs to set the bit in, and the pale gold-colored shavings would sprinkle down on the melting snow. The first trickle of sugar water would come from the spile hole and run, darkening, down the trunk. Mama would twist a hollow spile into the hole until it fitted, and hang up the first sap bucket. On days when there was a good run of sap, a tiny stream of water would trickle out of the spiles and the sounds of sweet water would sing in the sunshine and the melting frost runes of the hills.
    We kids gathered buckets of sap, moving from tree to tree with our three-gallon buckets. The water sweetened the black pots, and we lit the fire so the sweet water could send up its first wisps of white steam. There was always a big log or two to sit on and rest and watch the fire. We children sat like three ragged blackbirds, dressed in long black stockings, too-small dark coats, and dark stocking caps and black gum shoes. Between bouts of sap collecting, we watched and sniffed the boiling sap water.
    Black night would come as the “sweety” began to thicken, and at supper time, we would rake out little beds of coal, five of us, moving busily in our narrow ring of light. We laid thick slices of ham on the sizzling redness and waited and smelled. For dessert,there would be roasted apples, half burned and half raw, and some cane-molasses cookies from a poke.
    In some of these years, G.D. was moonlighting as a bookkeeper for the lumber company, and he would come and join us by late suppertime. Then, with the fire in the center and the black hillsides all around us, we waited for the sugar to boil down. When the sweety began to foam up like it would run over, Granny Fanny would take a piece of fat side meat fastened on a stick and run it back and forth to quiet the roiling waves. It was like the wand in my fairy story book: the