I saw the grass today. It was brown and matted, like a dog coming out of a muddy creek. The frost is still lingering for too long in the morning, but the sun is hanging a little bit higher each day, promising warmer days ahead. Nights are still cold, freezing puddles of meltwater that might cycle between liquid and solid for weeks.

This is maple sugaring weather. That freezing and thawing cycle sends nutrient-rich sap flowing up from roots to branches, where it will soon feed spring growth.

Our season starts with a freezing night followed by a warm, sunny day. We already have all the tools we need to harvest nature’s sweetness. We drill small holes in our maples and insert our metal taps, nudging them just two or three inches into the trees at slight downward angles. We tap the trees’ sunniest, most exposed faces, which yield more sap. Then we attach clear plastic tubing, which feeds the sap into five-gallon plastic buckets through small holes in the lids, excluding bugs and debris.

We collect and consolidate until we get fourteen gallons—our boiler’s limit. Then, my dad watches it cook. He’s the master syrup maker. I’m still learning. The boil is slow, and there isn’t much you can do to improve it without pro-grade equipment. The sap has to reduce forty times, becoming so thick and sweet that it goes seven degrees above the boiling point of water. That take hours—for us, usually about twelve hours.

You can smell the end of the process. The sap, which initially looks, tastes, and smells more or less like water, takes on a sweet, candy-like aroma, perfuming the woods. In the boiling pan, the bubbles begin to look less like the bubbles you see in boiling water and more like bubbles in a fizzy soda. They tighten up.

The final product is just a small fraction of our original harvest. We treat it like gold. We don’t dump it over our breakfast plates. We drizzle the hard-earned syrup onto steaming pancakes and fork up our first bites before we lose even a drop.