March 18, and we still have a foot and a half of snow on the ground. It’s supposed to get down to 16 degrees tonight. But the days are getting longer, the horses are shedding, someone reported hearing a woodcock last week, someone else saw a turkey vulture.
In another sign of spring, three generations of the La Coss family are gathering sap. They tap over a hundred sugar maples in our woods; plastic tubing conveys the sap to a big silver holding tank, from which sloshing gallons are periodically collected. The La Cosses truck the sap to the sugarhouse on their farm up the hill, and boil it down. It takes 40 gallons of sap to make a gallon of syrup, pronounced “surp” here in Vermont’s Northeast Kingdom.
Some people lease their trees to be tapped. Ours is a less formal arrangement, with the La Cosses giving us as much syrup as we want. We ran out of last year’s stock a couple weeks ago, and we rather desperately anticipate having more soon. The year’s first maple syrup on pancakes is hard to beat.
Book Stuff
Lay This Body Down got a nice review in the New York Journal of Books: “Fergus’s writing lays out both the struggles of a new nation, and the pains of growing into determined manhood with its allegiances, regrets, and consolations. . . The author’s meticulous historical portrayal offers a potent integrity.”
The book launch for the novel happened at our local library two weeks ago. I look forward to two more events in Pennsylvania in early May.
On Tuesday, May 2, at 7 p.m., I’ll speak at Centre Furnace Mansion, home of the Centre County Historical Society, in State College. This impressive house was built by Moses Thompson in 1842 next to his ironmaking furnace, which also remains standing.
On Wednesday, May 3, at 6:30 p.m., I’ll be at the Bellefonte Art Museum, in an old stone house in Bellefonte, the seat of Centre County. Before the Civil War, the house was a station on the Underground Railroad. It’s an apt setting for my talk: in Lay This Body Down, a freedom-seeking young man stays in such a dwelling in Adamant.
I will be in central Pennsylvania at a time when the new leaves will be unfurling on the trees, showing that pale, tender, startling, near-neon green. Then it really will feel like spring.
(My friend Jeff Mathison created this illustration of a central Pennsylvania iron furnace. Check out his work at artbymathison.com and mapsbymathison.com.)
