New England Spring

The first robin, mud, bluebirds peering into old nesting boxes, dirty piles of melting snow along driveways, mud, paired geese on the wing, blooming snowdrops, rain, mud, roaring winds, freezing nights and muddy days, and the optimistic maple sap bucket all herald the spring equinox a few days from now. Did I mention mud?
Maple trees are abundant in New England, at times so dense as to be called a sugar bush. Each tree may produce a dozen gallons of sap per tap. These trees have but one tap each, but a large one nearby in this sugar bush has six taps.
The sapper puts up his buckets in early March for some four weeks, collecting two-percent sugar sap, which must be concentrated to 65-percent sugar by boiling 40 gallons of water down to a gallon of syrup, which then weighs a bit more than 11 pounds, whereas a gallon of water weighs about eight pounds. (A pint's a pound, the world around.)
For a sustained run of clear sap, nights should be below freezing and days well above. On cooler days, the sap just won't run, and successive days of sustained warmth redirects the sap into making leaves, the tree's solar factories. A peek under the rain lid into one bucket showed no sap running on this overcast, cold morning, a temporary moment of no mud.