The two gone, Norman took his chair again. Leah watching him. Norman said, “That just made me feel like old folks.”

Leah smiled, a hand over her belly and said, “Just wait, you.”

The second week of March brought a sudden deep thaw that Norman declared to be brief and was: three days and nights above freezing with the days arching into the mid-forties. Then six inches of wet snow and the wind shifted and all froze hard again. Still that thaw was enough for Norman to carry the stacked sap buckets from the hayloft to the basement where beside the old milk cooling well he filled them in regimental rows, letting them sit with water overnight to swell the staves tight within the hoops. From the sledge he scraped out the layer of ice mixed with bark and sawdust and rolled the gathering tank into place. Set in the gathering yokes and buckets and took the team and sledge once again up the hill past the skidway to the small sugar house, just a roof on poles over a chimney and bricked hearth with a firepit underneath and the heavy boiling kettle set into the bricks. There unhitched the team and roped together the buckets in bundles and hung them over Tommy’s back and let the horse follow him as Norman broke trail on snowshoes through the sugarbush, stopping at each of the rock maples to bore holes and hammer in spouts and hang buckets. Back down at the sugarhouse he shoveled out the drifted snow and pulled canvas tarping from the year-old woodpiles extending off the north side. He filled the boiling kettle halfway with snow and made a fire underneath and waited for the snow to melt and then scrubbed the inside of the kettle with a stout limb with a gobbed head of burlap sacking on the end. The sugarhouse was raw and bleak, more so with the winter snow cast out and the floor bare earth but he could see it already as it would be in a week’s time or two: steam flaring off the kettle, the firebox running day and night with smoke hanging in the limpid air, the sweet scent of the woods rising as each boil-down ended and the kettle was tipped to pour off the syrup into the filters. Connie even now down to the house washing the squares of red flannel and spreading them on racks to dry tight-sided in the kitchen. Then he went down the hill, stopping at the sawpit to load the tools from there. He spent one afternoon in the barn wiping them down with grease and hanging them for the summer. Weather aside, he was done lumbering for the year.