My Native keeps telling me that I ought to give up on the iPhone’s photo filtering toys, but really, it’s a garbage can buried in the snow. What better subject on which to practice?
So now, Cooter Hollow trivia of the day. Guess why we buried our 32-gallon garbage bin in the snow.
Give up?
As it happens, the trees around here really love it when a little cold spell interrupts their sap-running season. If I had to work it as metaphor, I’d say that they get so depressed by the new snow that when it lets up, the tears of joy are ceaseless. And my friends, they are ceaseless.
We staggered back from a night out on Thursday to find our long-neglected, long-frozen buckets overflowing with the good stuff. Collection on Hangover Friday was just as productive. By Friday evening, we were at capacity: the FIMCO tank and all four of our water cans were filled to the top, which meant that unless we wanted to bathe and wash dishes in sap, we’d need to resume boiling.
We also needed more storage space for our newly weeping maples. We took a garbage bin, cleaned and lined it, and buried it to keep it cold and insulated. And now it, too, is full.
Every time I think we couldn’t possibly be more ghetto in our approach to life, we do something like serve up maple syrup that’d been housed in the same place as things you needn’t know about, things whose smells should really not enter the same sentence as Maple Syrup, and my brain plays a game of table tennis between “We are so resourceful!” and “We’ve surely hit a new low this time,” and every damned time, the match ends in a draw.
So now we had storage temporarily figured out, but of course we were also out of cookstove wood, and would either need to chop more, or dip into the house firewood pile. And given the fact that every time spring threatens to come, it gets punched in the nuts by another foot of snow, we didn’t want to tap what’s left of the house wood. So, we split some cold, wet, green, totally unseasoned and largely useless logs, and got to work.
And of course! Cold, wet, green, totally unseasoned and largely useless logs don’t throw a lot of heat, which means the trees were leaking faster than we could boil it. An old inefficient incandescent lightbulb went off in a halo atop the head of My Native, and with it, the idea to stuff the oven with wood, to help dry it out. This ended up working brilliantly, which should not be surprising in the least, and before we knew it, I was spilling sap and overboiling like a champ.
In a particularly winning moment, we all enjoyed a nice pyrotechnics display as I’d moved a box of Strike Anywhere matches to atop the hot stove.
In more voluptuous news, my seedlings of what will soon to be plump, round, ready-to-bury-one’s-face melons are right at home in the new coldframe, which is heating up to about 90 degrees in the middle of the day. Which gives me three questions for you:
1> do you think that’s too hot?
2> It’s bound to get hotter, if winter ever responds to the nut-kicking; what’s too hot?
3> do you think it’d be weird if I just climbed in there with them? Because if I were to lie in 90-degree weather and close my eyes, I’ll bet I could delude myself all the way to the Caribbean. And because it’s snowing today, curling up in the cold frame with my would-be melons seems the only way to deal with it.