This spring, here on the coast of Maine, we experienced the usual horror of March, cold blasts followed by balmy days, and then back again, often on the same day. April wasn’t much better, although a few unseasonably warm days sent us all scrambling for rakes and shovels to get an early start on winter cleanup and the first flails of laying out the garden. But then the gray skies and winds swept us all back inside, gritting our teeth and grudgingly turning on the heat or stoking the woodstove. There’s a desperation to it, since we know a 55-degree day in March or April can be followed by a foot of snow or, worse, a sleet storm that coats your cheeks and clogs your ears. Vermont writer Noel Perrin called this time of year “unlocking” – a separate season as distinct from winter and then spring, which, as everyone here knows, really doesn’t occur until May, those perfect days of warmth and color, birds chattering with a vibrancy that truly banishes the freeze. The hold that winter has eventually releases its grip, slowly unlocking for a good eight weeks in March and April, but only grudgingly and with a prolonged fight that feels personal and involves wildly swinging temperatures and bitter wind, sprinkled with an occasional day when the wind is quiet and the sun able to assert itself.

Verlyn Klinkenborg, in The Rural Life, described spring in the woods of his Upstate New York farm as a visual chaos, an “indiscriminate tangle,” with “metabolisms, cross-conspiring, begin[ing] to slip out of dormancy about now.” To which he added, “It was spring and it wasn’t. The bees droned in the sunshine, hovering near the lengths of wood I had just finished cutting. In this still early season, the sap that oozed from the heartwood was the sweetest thing to be found.”

For this reason, the confused and lonely grayness, I tap trees and boil sap just as soon as I can and have done so, off and on, for at least the past 25 years. Not every year, since we live on an island with few sugar maples, but whenever I can slip away to New Hampshire where a small group of friends run their sugarhouses on a small hill in view of Mt. Monadnock. This year, we had made an early foray west in January and set up the evaporator, cleaning the mice nests out of the buckets and piles of hoses before pressure-washing everything to a shine. We thought we were getting a jump on the season, but then we heard that one neighbor had not only tapped his trees but was boiling as well. In January. This is unlocking at its most fickle. Six weeks later, the dog and I were back and the sap had begun to flow in earnest. And so had the beer at each of the sugarhouses we visited. At Camp Glen Brook in Marlborough, my old friend Grant and I drew off ten buckets of syrup before the day was out, occasionally mixing a taste with a splash of bourbon, the sharpness of the liquor mellowing the heat and sweetness. The day was alternately cloudy and breezy with brief patches of sun. Perrin again: “[T]he more capricious the weather—the more spring seems to come and then dances away again—the better the sugaring.”

Perrin had a horse named Dr. Pepper who would nose his way into sap buckets and slurp them dry; I have an Australian shepherd named Georgie, whose trick is to slyly slurp at the sticky buckets when my back is turned. He chases sticks and rolls in the snow, keenly aware by the brightness he sees in my face, that the rising warmth is cause for celebration.

When I was a young father of two boys, we gathered sap around the island neighborhood with a little red wagon and a plastic bucket, one boy pulling and the other pushing, with me ferrying the sap buckets to their jaunty sap-caravan. We collected it on the shady side of the house and on weekends rolled downhill to the beach, where we had driftwood fires and boiled it off, filling beer bottles and whatever we pulled from the recycling bin. We plugged the tops with cork.

As they grew older, and we migrated around, my wife and I multiplied, adding a curly-haired girl and a toe-headed boy, and eventually graduated to a real sugarhouse. The Dominion & Grimm evaporator, 150 buckets and miles of hose became my new axis mundi come spring. I used a hydrometer and wool filters, a canning device, and real bottles that came in boxes of 12, and little bags of screw-top lids. We were in business, selling 12-ounce bottles for $10 apiece to supplement the camp’s revenue. I stapled drawings and poems and diagrams to the wall, celebrating the strange miracle that each year gave shape to our world for six weeks.

I’m about to be a grandfather, the son who pulled the wagon will be pushing a baby stroller soon; and soon after that, the eventual toddler will wobble around after me at the sugarhouse if I am so lucky. The inconstancy of the unlocking of winter and the emerging spring will give way to full-blown summer, the passing months dimming the memories of the joy of sap flowing from trees and releasing the world from darkness.