Mild daytime temperatures and cool nights mean one thing in
Vermont this time of year: Sugarin’ Season. Last weekend I went over to visit
our friends David and Louse Brynn, who are some of the first people we met when
we moved to Bristol twenty years ago. Louise is a 7th generation Bristolite
whose ancestors seem to have had a hand in all aspects of local business and
general running-of-the-town since their arrival. The Brynns live in a house
that they built themselves (something I still find inconceivable and
awe-inspiring) on 33 acres of family land that Louise has graced with stone
art: rambling stone walls lead up a path to a tree house (which features
hardwood floors and I can attest sleeps a family of four, and which they also
built themselves); stone balancing sculptures rise up from an overgrown meadow
and dot the lawn sloping down to their garden, bordered with espaliered pear
trees. If it sounds idyllic, it is.
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| Photo by Devon Brynn |
The land is also abundant with sugar maples which, for the
past twenty-two years, David and Louise have tapped to make maple syrup. At one
point, briefly, they used rubber tubing to increase their production and sold
some of their syrup commercially, but they prefer to do it the old fashioned
way: collecting the sap in sixty metal buckets attached to the trees and
carrying it down to their sugarhouse (also built by them) to pour into their
wood-fired “rack,” the apparatus that transforms the sap into syrup.
