Living Stories

Projects of yesterday today.

Today, the rain lightly fell as I drove my father to his favorite restaurant to celebrate his 71st birthday. Both he and my mother were great parents and very supportive of my sister and I in life. Many small projects that started with a question became very involved pastimes. Dad always tried to answer our questions and encouraged us to look into things we didn’t understand. Storytelling was a big part of it. Dad both created stories and also told stories.

As a child, I asked my father about water I saw dripping from a tree as we were walking along the cold Starrucca Creek one early February day. “That’s sap.” He told me. “Here, have a taste. It’s a little sweet. In Early spring, the trees start sucking up water, and if you make a hole into the inner bark, the sap will run out. You can collect it, and this is how maple syrup is made. Here, I’ll show you.” Dad went up to the house and brought back the hand drill. After drilling a hole he took a small sumac branch, hollowed out the pulp and tapped the wood tube into the tree. “Now we can hang a little coffee can on it and let it drip. When we return tomorrow, you can see how much we collect.”

That started our sap and maple syrup operation for a few seasons. We needed to build a sap house and make our own syrup. I would help Dad collect and strain the sap after school and then boil it down in the sap house. Dad had a custom-made stove made and burned slab wood for the boils.

I remember sitting in the sap house doing my homework in the evenings as Dad would scoop ladles of sap from one vat to another. It took 40 gallons of sap to boil down one gallon of syrup. I enjoyed drinking the sweet sap in a tin cup as it thickened. Dad would finish the syrup off in the house and then can it. Dad loved making pancakes for dinner, and the meal often tasted better with the homemade maple syrup on top.

Dad also introduced me to wild clay. We were able to get a pail from a spot in the creek. Dad and I knew nothing about the clay or the process at the time. All we knew was maybe we needed to dry it out and fire it somehow. We decided to use an old snapping turtle shell. The shell came from an old preacher with whom we were good friends from church. The snapping turtle was in the preacher’s pond. Worried it might become a problem, the preacher shot the huge turtle, made turtle soup, and saved the shell.

Dad and I decided to make a turtle using the shell. We packed it with clay and let it dry. After, we made an amateur attempt to fire it by placing it on the stove. We discovered we would need a hotter fire than the woodstove could provide. After a time, the legs and head of your turtle cracked and broke. Laughing, we gave up on the project. I never forgot our fun, even if the project didn’t turn out how we expected. At least we tried.

We are still trying. Dad thought he might stop by and help me build the wood kiln. “I don’t know too much about it, but it might be neat to help out if you tell me what to do,” Dad said today, eating his birthday breakfast at Cracker Barrel. “Naww, Dad, those bricks are heavy. I would have you drive the tractor and haul the bricks.” I said, taking a sip of coffee. I knew he was serious.

A guy who used to climb to the top of silos and milk cows would have no issues stacking bricks. Age, however, set the limits on what he might be able to do, and we both had a larger project the whole family was working on. That project was getting mom, who is 89, used to being cared for in the skilled nursing facility after her light stroke. After living together for 50 years, the changes were challenging, and the path was difficult for us all. This was one long-term project we could not mess up on. What life stories and projects are you working on?