over bowls of fresh snow. They cut 
the sweetness with sour or dill pickles, 
set aside for this purpose when pickles 
were being put up in the fall, and 
fill up on doughnuts. The sugaring- 
off party used to be a big neighbor- 
hood gathering to which all the women 
brought homemade “plain dough- 
nuts.” “Now you might ask,” grins 
Lucille, “what is a plain doughnut? 
Is it a raised doughnut or one that 
is made with biscuit dough? The fact 
is no two women’s doughnuts are the 
same, and each of us jealously guards 
her own way of making them.” And 
fifty years ago, potent sap beer was 
passed around more than now. This 
beer takes only two weeks to make 
from sap and hops: “It’s clear like 
champagne. But don’t be fooled,” Lu- 
cille cautions. “If you drink more than 
a little glassful, you don’t move.” 
During the worst of mud season a 
deceptive mud hole appears in front 
of Lucille’s house on Hollister Hill. 
When her youngest son, Dean, was 
a teen-ager, he used to sit in the yard 
with a collection of old fence posts, 
planking, and big stones waiting for 
a car to come along. People would 
drive up to it, get out, stand and look. 
After the sap has been boiled 
down in a sugarhouse, left, the new 
maple sugar and syrup are enjoyed 
on bowls of fresh snow, lower 
left. Firewood, below, remains an 
important fuel, at least for 
auxiliary wood stoves. 
They’d even discuss the prospects with 
Dean. Often they would turn around 
and drive away, but sometimes they 
would say, “Oh, I can make it.” Then 
Dean would sit and wait, and when 
the wheels were disappearing in the 
mud, he would move down the yard 
to help the driver drop in stones and 
lay the boards. Almost no car could 
run the hole alone, and no one ac- 
cepted Dean’s help without giving him 
a dollar or so. It was reliable mud 
money. 
“Sugaring,” Lucille explains, 
is over when the peepers sing. That is 
the beginning of spring. Or when I go 
out on the porch in the morning and 
hear the first redwing. It’s a wonderful 
sound. Before spring comes we want so 
much to taste fresh fish that we fish 
through the ice for anything. One day 
my husband, Sil, and I caught seventy- 
four fish through the ice, and when they 
were all cleaned, they weighed only two 
and a quarter pounds. But we ate them, 
they tasted so good. Some Woodbury peo- 
ple go smelting; there are smelt in Nelson 
Pond. The smelt go up the creek by Cran- 
berry Pond. But it’s time for perch fishing 
when the apple blossoms just begin to 
open. You know it’s spring when you’re 
able to open all the doors and windows 
and let the air in, when you look out 
over the countryside and see a rose-col- 
ored hue over the whole side hill. 
After town meeting and sugaring, 
and up to Memorial Day, one of the 
main chores is going into the woods, 
where the ground is still frozen but 
most of the snow is gone, and cutting 
down next winter’s wood. Later in the 
summer these logs will be hauled out, 
sawed, split, and stacked. It’s getting 
to be more and more like the old days. 
Richard W Brown 
75 
