Maple and Mud Season

To help celebrate Sugarin' Season, we took a brief excerpt from the book Midwives: A Novel by Chris Bohjalian. We recently reviewed this book for our Book of the Month Selection. Maple and mud definitely are spring partners! Learn more about Sugarin' Season.

"Here's what I recall: I recall that the mud was a nightmare that year, but the sugaring was amazing. That's often the case. If the mud is bad, the maple will be good, because mud and maple are meteorological cousins of a sort. The kind of weather that turns dirt roads in Vermont into quicksand in March -- a frigid, snowy winter, followed by a spring with warm days and cold, cold nights -- also inspires maple trees to produce sap that is sweet and plentiful and runs like the rivers swollen by melted snow and ice."

"My mother's and father's families no longer sugared, and so my memories of that March revolve more around mud than maple syrup: For me, that month was largely an endless stream of brown muck. It covered my boots to my shins in the time it would take to trudge fifty yards from the edge of our once-dirt driveway to the small cubbyhole of a room between the side door and the kitchen, which earned its name as a mudroom in those days. The floors and walls would be caked with the stuff. "

"But wet or dry, the mud was everywhere for two weeks in the March of 1980. The dirt roads become sponges into which automobiles were constantly sinking and becoming stuck, sometimes sinking so deep that the drivers would be unable to open their doors to escape and would have to climb through the car windows to get out....but the sugaring was good and the syrup crop huge."

If you are interested in ordering this book, it is available in our Country Bookstore: Fiction. Click on the link below to view more descriptive information, pricing and/or order Midwives: A Novel from the Amazon.com catalog.