I was reminded this evening just how closely tied success and failure can be sometimes.
This morning I took the kidlets out to a friend’s farm to visit. Our friends have tapped 4 large maple trees and invited us to help collect the sap and take it home to make some syrup of our own. Well, naturally we all liked the idea of this experiment! It could result in yummy maple syrup!
The boys collected all the sap into our largest cooking pot. When we got it home, I strained it twice through a wire strainer lined with coffee filters (I had no cheese cloth around) to get out the bits of bark and other dirt.
Then we set it all to boil. We kept coming back to stir and remove the foam at the top. I sent the kidlets to bed and kept on going. Brian and I decided to watch an episode of Downton Abbey while it continued. And the house smelled heavenly! Best air freshener ever.
One of the times we paused Downton to check on things, I removed and strained a mug-full to cool so we could warm it up as “tea” tomorrow. It wasn’t quite syrup yet. More like a thin maple tea. So yummy.
Anyway, a few minutes later, I noticed something in the kitchen so I went to take another look and all the rest had burned! Boo! I had to rush the pot outside onto the step. We opened the windows and turned on a fan to push the smoke out of the house. The kidlets are going to be sad about this in the morning! Now I’m extra glad I saved them some for sipping from the fancy teacups!
I think we’ll have to give this another try another time. We had great success and it very quickly moved straight on into defeat. It happens. Life is like that sometimes. But there is always some good to take away from it — and I’m sure next time we’ll do a much better job!
Sew is Me 