More Pictures

Since my beloved readers seem to like pictures, a few more from my perfect maple sugar outing. As a bonus, we drove by THREE covered bridges, one of which led us to some beautiful trails in Turkey Run State Park, where Nicki and I strolled for a while with her sweet dog, Henry.

I bought maple syrup cookbooks, a maple syrup coloring book (Cheryl, if you are reading this, forget you read this as otherwise you won't be surprised by one of your Christmas presents this year!), maple sugar candy (natch!); also some strongly (but not maple) scented hand-made soap (at the fairgrounds there was a building selling all kinds of crafts, not necessarily maple-themed). I also bought a dog-pull toy for Henry, to thank him for being so patient during the times we made him wait in the car. As we drove home, we stopped in the town of Rockville (Parke County's county seat), and I bought some tights at the variety store on the courthouse square. But I resisted temptation and didn't buy the maple-icing-filled maple-leaf-shaped cookies I bought once before at that same store.

After all, I don't want to overdo the maple sugar theme, now, do I?

Maple Sugar Time: Part Three

Discouraged but undefeated, Nicki and I drove north from the first, disappointing sugar camp to the next one on our festival list: the Foxworthy Sugar Camp. We drove through woods to get there: a good sign! When we pulled into the camp, we saw a cloud of steam arising from one of the outbuildings: another good sign! When we inquired at the little shop if any of the trees were being tapped today, we were told, "You just walked past two of them." And we had!

It was all perfect, EXACTLY the way Miracles on Maple Hill had led me to think it would be. Pails hung from trees, with sap dripping into them with agonizing slowness: drop by drop by drop. In the sweet-smelling steamy outbuilding where the sap was being boiled down into syrup, we were told that it takes SEVENTY GALLONS of sap dripped into the buckets drop by drop to make ONE GALLON of syrup.

If there was ever a metaphor for my faith that little things add up - an hour a day of writing, a page a day of writing - here it was. Every time for the rest of my life that I pour real maple syrup onto a piece of French toast, I will think about today: syrup as a distillation of tiny drops of sap accumulated into a vat filled with seventy gallons of sap to be boiled down into one gallon of syrup. A miracle, indeed.

Maple Sugar Time: Part Two

Yesterday I set out mid-morning with my friend Nicki to attend the Parke County Maple Sugar Festival. After a drive of half an hour or so past barren but beautiful corn fields and soy fields awaiting the spring planting, we reached the 4-H Fairgrounds just north of Rockville around 10:30. Although he was looking very spiffy in his little coat, Nicki's dog, Henry, had to wait for us in the car as we entered the festival headquarters where the all-day pancake breakfast was being served.

For six dollars a plate, we each devoured sausage patties and a stack of fresh-flipped pancakes, with butter and, of course, extremely delicious maple syrup. Then we took the printed list of the nearby sugar camps; of the five camps on the list, only three were open today. So we drove to the first one, following various twists and turns, until we turned onto the pleasingly named Egg Farm Road. Someday I would like to live on a road called Egg Farm Road.

But the camp on Egg Farm Road was not what I dreamed it would be. The garage-like structure that held the syrup-boiling equipment was cold and quiet; the camp was open, but they weren't boiling any syrup today. We walked over to the few sparse trees fringing the graveled area where we had parked. The trees had some kind of plastic tubing attached to them to get the sap out. We didn't see any sap running through the tubing, and tubing wasn't what we had come to see. We had come to see little tin buckets hanging from the trees! We had come to see the sap boiled into syrup! If there had been snow on the ground, I would have wanted to pour some syrup onto the snow to harden as Laura and Mary do in one of the Little House books. But there was no snow and no syrup.

I thought about how my sister had almost flown out from New Jersey to go the Maple Syrup Festival with me. Was this what she would have seen: plastic tubing stuck into a couple of trees? Were there no longer any Maple Hill miracles to be had?

TO BE CONTINUED

Maple Sugar Time: Part One

When I was a child, my sister and I both loved Virginia Sorenson's children's novel Miracles on Maple Hill, which won the Newbery Medal in 1957. In the book, ten-year-old Marly's father is a newly released prisoner of war suffering from what we today would call post-traumatic stress disorder. Desperate for a change, the family temporarily relocates from Pittsburgh to rural Pennsylvania, during sugaring-off season. For Marly, the rising sap is a "miracle," and no more miraculous is the change it brings to her father: "Daddy is better at Maple Hill." My children's literature professor, Anne Scott MacLeod, called Miracles on Maple Hill "a very sappy book" (pun intended). But this was one of the only times I knew her to be wrong. It wasn't a sappy book, it was a wonderful book.

Until I reread the book this past year as part of my research for a paper I was writing on "redemption through the rural" in mid-twentieth-century children's literature, I had forgotten the farm was in Pennsylvania, just assuming that it was in New England: didn't all maple syrup come from Vermont? But now that I am living in rural Indiana, I have discovered that not only does maple syrup come from Vermont, and Pennsylvania, it comes from Indiana. Parke County, just to the west of where I live in Putnam County, is not only the covered bridge capital of the United States, but has several maple sugar camps as well. And this weekend is the Parke County Maple Syrup festival.

I was bound and determined to go the festival of course, in search of an experience I've been dreaming of for at least forty-five years now. Would it turn out to be the miracle I hoped it it would be?

TO BE CONTINUED!

Outing to Indy

Today I went with my colleague Martha, who teaches the children's literature course in our English department here at DePauw, to the Indianapolis Youth Literature conference at the main branch of the public library in downtown Indianapolis. I wasn't speaking, just listening and learning.

The library itself is STUNNING: a gorgeous historic structure gorgeously expanded, so that it has BOTH wood-paneled reading rooms with leather chairs in front of a lit fireplace AND soaring four-story atrium with light and air everywhere. The program featured inspirational Phillip Hoose, author of the much acclaimed book about teenaged civil rights protester Claudette Colvin (Claudette Colvin: Twice Toward Justice - she refused to give up her seat on a Montgomery, Alabama, bus well before Rosa Parks and was the inspiration for Rosa's later act of rebellion); delightful Shannon Hale (The Princess Academy and other fairy tale-based fantasy fiction); and Nick Bruel (author/illustrator of the Bad Kitty books).

The day was altogether a treat. On the wall of the old part of the library are engraved these words:

TIME BY MINUTES SLIPS AWAY
FIRST THE HOUR AND THEN THE DAY
SMALL ITS DAILY LOSS APPEARS
YET IT SOON AMOUNTS TO YEARS

Sobering thought, that! But days spending time with fellow authors and committed librarians add up to years well spent.

Envy

Like many people, I'm subject to envy. But one strange feature of my envy is that typically I envy not people who have achievements forever unattainable to me, people who are impossibly smarter, richer, nicer, more talented, better looking. I envy people who have things that are well within my reach, that I could have only by willing harder to get those things.

Take my friend Kim. I envy the little meals she makes for herself every day. She'll email me about them, as part of our regular catching up with each other about the events of our lives. I'll hear that last night she made herself stuffed shells filled with spinach and ricotta, and a salad of fresh greens tossed with a light dressing; with that she had a glass of Italian wine from Tuscany; while she ate she listened to Vivaldi. And I'll feel this keen stab of unbearable yearning: how I want that little meal, made so lovingly by her for her, rather than, say, the piece of leftover cold pizza eaten standing up in the kitchen.

And then I want to say to myself "Um, Claudia? You COULD have that." But for some reason I don't do it.

Lately I've been especially envying my former self - not my much younger, thinner self of decades ago, but my self of last year. Last year at this time I was in the middle of writing a novel and I was absolutely consumed with it. I attended the convention of the Association for Practical and Professional Ethics in Cincinnati (which I'll be attending again weekend after this one), and I spent most of my time there in my hotel room writing, or sipping pomegranate martinis in the bar while writing - writing, writing, writing! This year, I'm not in the middle of writing anything. So I'll just go to the conference sessions, I guess. Poor me! Lucky her!

And then I want to say to myself, "Um, Claudia? You could BE her!" But for some reason lately I haven't been writing.

So: nice little meals for one. Writing something, anything. It's a topic for another day why we so often don't let ourselves have the things we want, things that seem so clearly to be within our reach. At least here in Greencastle, I do often take myself out for nice little meals to restaurants: to get a baked sweet potato and veg o'day at Chief's, to have my beloved French toast at the Blue Door Cafe. And I HAVE been making lots of tantalizing notes in the little leather-bound notebook that Gregory gave me for Christmas, which I've christened my creativity notebook.

So I'm getting that much closer to eating Kim's meals and writing the way I did last year, to getting for myself those little highly attainable things that I keep on coveting.

Crocuses

My friend Jen told me that the crocuses are beginning to pop up; she reported that one lawn on the street leading over to the darling little campus observatory is a riot of crocuses in bloom. So this morning, early, I set out to investigate.

Instead of walking my usual route up and down Seminary Street, from my shabby end to the university president's grand end, I zigzagged on a different route over toward the observatory. When I got to the crocus street, at first I didn't see any crocuses at all. I knew they couldn't have died and disappeared already. I thought maybe they were asleep for the night and hadn't yet awakened to the sunrise. But surely there would be some sign of them, somewhere, even if their petals were folded tight and not yet reopened to the sun.

Then, there they were! Masses of them, all tiny, all purple, covering an entire lawn. They were definitely still getting used to its being morning, but it was lovely to start my day as they started theirs.

It's really been a mild winter here in Greencastle: one snow of a couple of inches, one freezing rain that left my car encased in ice that melted by the next day, a couple of cold patches where I was grateful for the big puffy coat I bought for six dollars at the local Goodwill. Nothing more than that. So I'm not sure that we really deserve spring yet.

But I'll take it anyway.