“Why don’t you sit down for a while, Son.”
I paused. The snow still clung tough to the ground, but it was a warm day. Mom had sent me out to give Dad a beer and wanted me to come back and help her put away my clothes and clean my room a little.
I think he saw me taking a look back at the house because he continued on, “Don’t worry, those chores will be there when you get back in the house. Sit down with me and your uncle here.” He pointed at Uncle Jack, who comes over just about every weekend. If it wasn’t maple sugaring season, it was football season and if it wasn’t football season it was hunting season and if there were any holes in the calendar, it was always a good time for some barbeque and beer. This was at least how Mom described it.
I scurried under the shed roof, moving from the glaring snow to shade. I saw his finger pointing to a camping chair propped in the corner near a shovel and an ax. The chair was a little dusty, sawdust mainly from the buzz of that saw on a piece that might not quite fit in his fire right. My dad was old school, as my mom said. He didn’t have a fancy boiling system for the sap or anything like that. He boiled it right over the fire and he didn’t really care what he burned, but it ended up being mostly pine popping along like mini fireworks before our eyes because the hardwoods kept the house warmer for longer in the winter.
I sat down and smelled the sap boiling down, already shrinking from those large buckets we dragged back here the other day. I looked across the fire and saw my dad leaning back in the chair, new beer in hand and sporting a thick winter beard with just a dusting of gray starting to work its way in there. His eyes held the fire and I saw his hands work the tab on the can, chhh. He slugged a couple sips and nodded over at Jack, who was poking at the fire with a charcoaled poking stick–poking stick was the technical term my father always used.
“You like the syrup, huh?” He nodded in my direction.
I scooted a step back from the fire, underestimating the warmth it was throwing. I nodded. “It’s good.”
“I’ve seen you load up those pancakes with it. It’s the best stuff around and even better because it’s ours.” A sense of satisfaction crept in at the end, like when my team won the pee wee football championship and he smiled so wide. “You know maple is tricky. A lot of people scorch it at the bottom of the pot or they worry about that and it ends up thinner than it should be.” He took a couple more sips of the beer, shook it and finished it off. “It’s got to be just right, the temperature, the boil, the color, all of it. It’s sort of like your mom in a way, you get her on those days where she’s a little hot headed and things aren’t working that well and there’s others where you can’t get a word out of her, only that cold shoulder, but when you get her in that sweet spot then she’s the Grade A amber all these sugarers around here are looking to make.”
I just nodded and listened. I knew my parents fought some, heard it through the walls some nights as I was trying to go to sleep. Really though, during the days it didn’t seem like they talked all that much. We went on trips here and there and they both seemed to have fun, but I’m not sure I saw them hug or kiss or dance at any of the family parties we’d gone to. We all listened to the crackle of the fire, mesmerized, and a soft breeze hit my back just right.
He shook the can again, shook his head a little and started to get up. Jack waved him off and made his way out of the shed and around the corner. I didn’t know if Mom knew about the cooler around behind the shed, but I’d scoped it out a few times wondering if my dad would miss one of them or just thought he’d miscalculated how many they’d had. Jack came back around, a thicker version of my dad, a couple extra beers in the gut or maybe he just held it a little different; he was younger in the face though and I wondered if the fact that he had nobody else to look out for kept him a little younger, but I wasn’t really sure. He sat and swung the beer over to my dad. They opened them in unison and took a couple sips.
The fire still blazing, but the small stack of wood that normally sat near it dwindled and my father made his way over to a few of the larger rounds butting up against one of the walls. He grabbed the ax, stood one up and gave it a quick over the head thwack and it fell in halves. He stood them up and thwack, thwack they were pie chunks. He tossed them over, underhand fashion and they nestled with a thump near the fire.
He sits and takes a couple more sips of the beer, closes his eyes for a second and I think he might fall asleep in the chair in front of the fire. He opens them slowly, his face glowing a little. “Shit lasts a long time if you can it right too, years at least. You’ll see when you get older. Good stuff is bundled up, safe and it lasts a lot longer. When it’s opened up, it’s not long before it goes sour.” He took another few sips and Jack was nodding along with what he was saying.
I remembered that first middle school dance and standing in a circle with the guys. Tommy and Mark chewing gum, even though we weren’t really supposed to bring in anything of our own. They’d dared me to dance with Cindy and I’d been interested in her for a long time. I remember how my hands cupped her sides and even though they were a little sweaty, I was excited. I wondered if something like that wore off if you kept doing it and if that was more what my dad was talking about.
“You know my favorite thing about maples?” He paused for a moment.
“Easy to identify?” Jack cut in.
My dad tipped the beer back and took it in a gulp. “They’re wood. When they stop making that sweet sap that we turn into sugar, you can cut them down and burn them. When they aren’t useful you have an out and it’ll end on a good note.” He stood, grabbed a couple of the chunks, maple this time, and threw them in the fire. The coals jumped and set in on consuming the pieces one by one and heating the thickening syrup to put on our pancakes one day down the road.
Find out more about Matt on our Contributors’ Page.
Matt’s short story collection Daydreams, Obsessions, Realities: A hybrid collection is published by Alien Buddha Press and is available here.
(Photo: Chiot’s Run/flickr.com/CC-BY SA 2.0)
- Qualities of a Maple Tree By Matt McGuirk - July 14, 2022