The Patience of Hands That Know the Trees

On Real Maple Syrup, and What Happens When a Practices Moves Away

19 July 2026 ~ 3 min read

The first time I poured maple syrup on a plate of pancakes in Southern California, the person across the table asked me what it was. I thought she was joking. She wasn’t.

What she knew — what most of the country knows now — was the bottle in the grocery store aisle. Corn syrup, caramel color, artificial maple flavoring. Sugar pretending to be something it has never been. She had lived her whole life without tasting the real thing, and she didn’t know there was a difference to taste.

I grew up in New England. Real maple syrup was on the table every Sunday morning. It came from small producers in Vermont and Quebec — family operations, a few hundred taps in a sugarbush behind the house, a wood-fired evaporator running all day through the short weeks of sap season in February and March. The syrup was dark and complicated. It tasted like the wood of the tree it came from, and like smoke, and like the patient chemistry of something that had been making sugar since before anyone at the table was born.

When I moved west, that syrup moved with me in memory only. You can’t find it in a Southern California grocery store. Not the real kind. Not the one my grandmother used.

So I made a phone call. A relative in northern New England began sending us the dark, late-season kind — the grade that used to be called “B” before the marketing people decided that sounded bad and renamed it Grade A Very Dark. Whatever you call it, it is the best maple syrup I have ever tasted. It is also, increasingly, the hardest kind to find. Most large commercial operations skim off the early, light-colored runs and blend them into the pale amber product that sells well in supermarkets. The dark syrup, the one that tastes like the actual tree, is what you get when a small producer is patient enough to keep boiling through the whole season — including the end, when the sap has started to turn and the flavor deepens into something most people have never known they wanted.

That patience is disappearing.

Small maple sugar producers are not disappearing for the reasons you might think. It isn’t climate change, though the sap seasons are shifting. It isn’t market forces, though they matter. It’s that the practice requires standing in a sugarhouse for sixteen hours at a stretch in late February, feeding a wood fire, watching a pan of boiling sap the way a conductor watches an orchestra — for hours, for weeks, through nights that never warm up. It requires hands that know the trees. It requires a patience that the modern economy does not reward and the modern schedule does not permit. And when the last generation of people who learned that patience from their parents stops tapping, the practice ends. Not because anyone killed it. Because no one was there to keep it alive.

Colleen, in Three Moons, is the last of a practice. Her father built the wood-fired evaporator she still uses. Her nephew Daniel was the one person who shared her love of the land — the only person who would have carried the sugarbush forward. In the novel, Daniel does not come home. The practice will end when Colleen does. The trees will still be there. The sap will still run. But no one will hang the buckets. No one will drill the taps by hand. No one will know how to read the weather the way her father taught her.

This is the quiet kind of loss the novel is about. Not violence. Not cataclysm. Just the steady, accumulating disappearance of practices that require more time than the world is willing to give them anymore.

I wrote a scene in the novel where Colleen drinks the end-of-season syrup straight from a spoon. She says it tastes like smoke and bark and the patient chemistry of a tree that has been making sugar since before anyone alive was born. That line came from a spoon of syrup at my own kitchen table. My wife keeps up with the producers we buy from. She follows them on social media, which is how a craft survives now when the people who practice it live a continent away from the people who love it. She watches the sap season from three thousand miles away. So do I.

If you have only ever known the bottle in the supermarket aisle, you have not known maple syrup. You have known sugar pretending to be something it has never been.

Find the real thing. Buy it from a family that still taps by hand. Pour it on something worth eating, and taste what three hundred years of patience actually produces.

And if you read Three Moons, you will meet a woman who has spent her whole life defending that patience — against a world that has never asked whether the things it’s trading away were worth keeping.

~ Liam