The Sugar Season by Douglas Whynott Read Free Book Online Page A

sufficient. (Tel. 835-2230)
    WHAT YOU WILL SEE IF YOU VISIT US:
•  50 mile view of fields, valleys and mountains. evaporators.
•  Gathering and/or boiling of sap.
•  Filtering of maple syrup.
•  Wooden, metal, plastic buckets, new plastic tubing systems.
•  Complete line of delicious maple products.
    WHAT YOU WILL HEAR:
•  The putt-putt of tractors.
•  The drip-drip of sap in metal buckets.
•  The rush of sap on its way to the evaporator.
•  The roar of the fires.
•  Explanation of the sugaring process.
•  The toot of the steam whistle announcing that syrup is being drawn off.
We do not have Florida’s climate, but we do have clean, fresh air aplenty atop our 1,500 foot Mt. Kingsbury. For this reason we suggest an extra sweater. Be sure to bring boots. We still have snow in the Spring! And don’t forget your camera!
    This was a family affair, the article said. There was a portrait photograph of the three kids, of Bruce, fourteen, a high school freshman, and Judy, twelve, a seventh grader, and Nancy, ten, a fifth grader, sitting around a table having a private sugar party. A pile of doughboys—doughnuts without holes—in a bowl. A bowl of pickles nearby. Judy looks into a tea cup while Nancy samples a doughboy, and Bruce seems to be lifting a piece of maple taffy from a pan of snow—sugar on snow.
    Ruth Bascom was a town girl from Milford, Massachusetts, who had been a secretary before she met Ken. The article stated, “On the maple side, all the family pitch in. WithMother Ruth as the head chef, the maple products are turned out in the family kitchen. Ruth brings her business training to play on the books of the maple business. She receives no pay. Ken says he figures she deserves the latest in kitchen and household appliances. One year she went without however—‘I was broke. I had bought a bulldozer,’ he says, grinning.”
    The Bascoms were active in their church and in community organizations. The Acworth 4-H club met in their living room, but it had grown so large that Ken built a garage with a room above where the club could meet. Ken held offices in the Grange, served as an Acworth selectman, as the director of the Farm Bureau, and was a member of the advisory board for the State Department of Agriculture. He was president of the New Hampshire Maple Syrup Producers Association and active in the North American Maple Syrup Council.
    The article closed with a note about the extent of the work on a maple farm. It took two days for the three- to five-man sugaring crew to get to all the 7000 buckets. In a normal season of six weeks, buckets were emptied from six to as many as twelve times—42,000 to 84,000 times in all.

    K EN BASCOM’S FATHER , Eric Bascom, was born on a farm about a mile away from the maple farm, on the other side of Langdon Woods. His father, James Bascom, was a farmer noted for his cleverness—he made a windmill from a wagon wheel—and for his ability to produce light-colored maple syrup. Eric Bascom attended a theological school in Maine,where he met his wife, Elida Frost. Ken Bascom was born there, in 1925. Eric and Elida became ordained ministers; Elida was the first female ordained minister in New Hampshire. They had four more children. Eric Jr. became an ordained minister in Springfield, Massachusetts. Rodney became a farmer and logger and taught at the University of New Hampshire. Paul became an agricultural statistician with the US Department of Agriculture. A sister, Shirley, raised a family in Tilton, New Hampshire.
    In the late 1920s Eric Bascom bought the farm on Mount Kingsbury for $2500, paying $30 down and $30 a month to the widow who owned it. The place was called the Stone House Farm because of the smart-looking stone house built in 1837 by Zenas Slader, who cut slabs from a seam on top of the mountain and moved them to the site with a team of oxen. Eric’s brother Glenn owned the farm further down the hill. At the time of his