By Margot Russell

In March, winter never really loosens its grip–not in Western New York. It just shifts its weight.

One day the snow softens and slides off the roof in heavy sheets, the next morning it’s back again–hard, frozen, and stubborn as ever. The calendar says spring, but no one here believes it. Not yet.

Still, something begins to change.

You hear it first–the birds returning, tentative at first, like they’re not entirely convinced either. Then a warmer afternoon arrives, and for a moment, just a moment, you feel it–the possibility of something beyond all this gray and white.

In March, we are ready for winter to be over.

But winter, as usual, is not ready to leave.

Sugaring season has begun–though like everything else lately, it comes in fits and starts. A few good stretches of freezing nights and warmer days get the sap moving, then a warm spell slows it down, then back again. The old rhythms are still there, but they’re less dependable than they once were.

Still, the sap runs.

And with it comes the first real sign of something sweet, as if winter is trying, in its own begrudging way, to show us he’s not all bad. Maple syrup is proof that something good can come from a season that takes such pride in being a tyrant.

The best syrup I’ve ever had comes from some land my husband owns with friends near Cooperstown. They tap the maples there, and every year they increase their yield. They built a small sugar house and stand outside every March–bundled up, steam rising, hands busy–boiling down the sap over the course of a weekend or two.

If you ever wonder why syrup is so expensive, take in this little fact: the ratio of sap to syrup for the sugar maple is about 40 to 1. That means if you want one gallon of syrup, you’d better have forty gallons of sap to boil down. And that means you’d better have a lot of trees to tap.

So next time you open that jug, think about all the time and effort and patience and love that went into that sticky amber. Yesterday, my grandson poured what felt like half the gallon onto his waffle and left the table with a small lake of syrup still swimming on his plate. He should have gone straight to family jail, and I’m not kidding. If it hadn’t been for the blobs of butter floating in it, I might have poured it back into the jug. That’s a crime against humanity right there. Thou shalt not waste Cooperstown syrup.

It turns out, lonely maples are the best trees for tapping. Not the ones crowded deep in the woods competing for light and nutrients, but that one proud maple standing alone in your yard–he’s your guy. His sap is more abundant and often sweeter. And why not? He’s had the run of the place–no competition, no struggle, just steady growth. A true one-percenter of the tree world.

These open-grown trees can produce up to a half gallon of syrup in a good season, while forest trees typically yield much less. And they’re easier to tap, too–no trudging deep into the woods, no hauling buckets over uneven ground.

What I love about sugaring–and farming in general–is that it requires wisdom. And since wisdom is in short supply these days, not just anyone can tap a maple or grow an eggplant well. You’ve got to know when to drill that tap–when the days rise above freezing and the nights fall back below. That delicate back-and-forth is what gets the sap moving.

In Western New York, that window used to arrive like clockwork–late February into March. Now, it dances around a bit. But the principle remains: cold nights, warm days, patience.

My favorite sugaring place is still Vermont, where some producers trace their land and practices back generations. The old-timers wore overalls and ear-flap hats, spoke in those thick Yankee accents, and trudged through the woods in their L.L. Bean boots like it was second nature.

I know two brothers up there who did just that for over sixty years. They retired recently, handing things over to their grandsons–who now stand in the same sugar house with laptops open, watching charts and forecasts, trying to turn tradition into something scalable and modern.

Maybe they will. Maybe they won’t.

But I’ll miss the image of those old brothers moving through the woods in early spring, guided not by data, but by instinct and memory. They used to say sugaring should stay wild and pure–that it’s about the wisdom that comes from doing the thing itself.

You can’t fake authenticity. If you try, it will show up in every bite.

Or in the pool of syrup left behind on a grandson’s plate.

Real people make really good syrup.

That will never change.