“Means we’ll be up day and night for a couple of weeks,” Connie agreed. “But I like it. That excitement.”

Leah kept eating. Her baby was due mid-April. She didn’t need to but she counted backward and forward again. About to speak, to correct them, when Norman went on. “I’ve by Jesus never seen a winter without a thaw late January early February. Just cold like this. Bitter cold. But its going to make for a good sap flow. You’d think it less exciting you slung a yoke and trudged the wet snow with sap buckets either side of you, instead of tending the boiling. But you’re right; I look forward to it.”

Connie said, “I could I’d match you in the woods bucket for bucket, and you know it too.”

Norman shook his head. “Yuht, you would. It’ll be on snowshoes this year too. Good for me I guess. Get hardened up for the summer.”

“That’s right. You been lazing around up to the sawpit all winter.”

“Yuht.” Grinned at his sister. Then serious again. “I don’t want the thaw now anyhow. I hate that stop-and-start sugaring. But Christ it could soften a little. I’ve got lambs coming any night now. Hard on those little buggers, this cold.”

Leah stood and carried her plate to the sink, clattering it down, and turned back. Both sitting watching her. Norman said, “You all right?”

Leah said, “I’ve got vinegar pie. Still warm but set up. You all want some?”

Norman nodded, studying her. She’d tried to explain herself to him days before but only managed to confuse and frighten him with her telling him she didn’t feel herself and then found herself reassuring Norman instead of the other way around. Since then, times she felt his eyes on her as if to fathom where she might be. That was fine. Let him keep an eye on her. He said, “I like that vinegar pie.”

Marthe Ballou came down on snowshoes late one bright morning, wearing the heavy green woolen trousers of her husband and a red and black mackinaw. She filled the kitchen with the dense scent of wood-smoked unwashed old woman, sitting with Leah and Connie and drinking coffee, two cork-stoppered bottles removed from her coat pockets before she sat down, the bottles clear glass with the murk tonic within: suffused wild herbs and the tender stripped inner bark of some half-dozen trees. Putting them on the table she said, “You steady now. Thought two see you through. You need more send that man up. Liddle spoon mornings all you need now, lest you got a taste for more. Me, I take it from first snow till dandylions out. Up to you.” Then sat silent drinking her coffee and refusing cookies while the sisters-in-law made chat of the cold and the three thus far new lambs until they ran out of things to say and fell quiet alongside Marthe. Marthe ignored Connie but kept her eyes on Leah throughout. After there had been steady silence for some long moments Marthe looked to Connie and said, “Come to see this one. Leave us lone, hey?”