Stevie (4 page)

Welcome to My Life …

I spent almost every second of the next week looking forward to my trip to Vermont. Finally the big day arrived. I packed my suitcase (which had plenty of room for my math book and
To Kill a Mockingbird
, along with the warm winter clothes I would need in Vermont’s northern climate), and my dad drove me to the airport in Washington, D.C., and made sure I got on the right plane. While I waited for the other passengers to board, I had a chance to think about my first trip to Vermont, which is known as the Green Mountain State. Actually, that’s what its name means—the
Ver
part means “green,” and the
mont
means “mountain.” That’s because there are lots of mountains there, and lots of green—except in the winter, when most of the green (and the mountains, for that matter) are covered in a layer of white snow.

My seatmate was one of the last people aboard. He was
a middle-aged man wearing a business suit. He smiled and said hello as he stuck his briefcase under the seat and sat down, so I said hello back. “Are you going to Vermont?” I asked him. Okay, I know that doesn’t sound like a very intelligent question, since obviously the whole plane was going to Vermont. But I was just trying to be friendly.

“Yes, I am,” he said. “I’m going to an office supply manufacturers’ conference.”

I controlled my urge to wrinkle my nose at that. It sounded pretty dull. I was afraid he might start going into more detail about staplers or whatever and put me to sleep, so I decided to change the subject. “I’m going to visit my friend Dinah,” I told him as the plane started taxiing down the runway. I turned to look out the window, wanting to see the city disappear beneath us. My mother always tells me it’s polite to look at someone when you’re speaking to them, but I figured this must be an exception. My seatmate probably wouldn’t mind if I kept an eye on the scenery while I talked.

I don’t remember exactly what I said, but basically I explained all about Dinah’s invitation for me to be a part of this year’s sugaring off. I figured the businessman probably knew a lot more about three-hole punches and pencil sharpeners than he did about making maple syrup, so I told him everything I had found out about it. For instance, I explained that the sap that becomes maple syrup comes from a tree called the sugar maple, or
Acer saccharum
, which grows best in temperate places where it’s really cold in the winter, like Vermont. I also discussed how we would be driving horse-drawn sleighs to collect the sap from the
maples, and some of the ways that driving a horse pulling a cart or sleigh is different from riding in a saddle.

Everything I was saying was so interesting that I hardly even noticed the flight. I guess it took a few hours to get from Washington to Vermont, but it felt like just a few minutes. I felt the plane begin its descent, and through the window I watched as we broke through a bank of fluffy white clouds and the land below us came into view. I watched in silence for a minute or two, amazed by the difference between the kind of landscape I was used to and this hilly, snow-covered place. Then, feeling guilty, I quickly summed up what I had been talking about so that my seatmate wouldn’t be left in suspense. “So,” I explained, “the most important part seems to be keeping an even tension on the long reins.”

I could see little figures on the ground below as our plane aimed for a long, straight runway that seemed to be the only thing that wasn’t covered with snow. Suddenly I realized that I was really here—in Vermont, about to see Dinah, ready to throw myself into the cool new experience of sugaring off. The excitement sort of overwhelmed me for a second so that I thought I wouldn’t be able to stand it.

“We’re almost here!” I cried.

My seatmate sat up straighter. “In Vermont already?” he said, rubbing his eyes and peering past me toward the window. “I had a great nap. I always sleep well on planes. Now, what was it you said you were coming up here to do?”

I couldn’t believe it. He had slept through my entire fascinating
lecture on sugaring off and sleigh driving! For a second I felt really annoyed and considered telling the man exactly what I thought of his manners. I mean, looking out the window while you’re talking is one thing. Falling asleep while someone else is talking—especially when she’s talking about something interesting—is something else!

Then I had a better idea. I smiled at him politely. “I said I’m going deep-sea diving as part of an archaeological exploration of the underwater caves that housed the early Viking settlers who actually turned out to be first cousins of Kublai Khan’s publicity people and who gave the recipe for spaghetti to Marco Polo. We want to find the part of the recipe that includes the sauce. You may think I’m too young to be involved in something like that, but I’m actually forty-three years old.”

The man gave me a really weird look, then cleared his throat and leaned over and started fiddling with his briefcase, even though the pilot had just said that we shouldn’t take out our under-seat baggage until the seat belt sign went off. I just shrugged and returned my attention to the window. I had better things to think about.

I was excited about seeing Dinah and about learning to drive a sleigh. I was also interested in learning more about sugaring off. It was sure to be a vacation I would never forget. But I had no idea at that moment exactly how memorable it was going to turn out to be.…

I had no trouble spotting Dinah in the airport. She and her father were waiting just outside the gate. As soon as I
saw her, it was as if she had never moved away. She was grinning and waving and jumping up and down, and as soon as I got through the gate, we raced up to each other for a good long hug.

In the car on the way to the Slatterys’ house, Dinah told me a lot more about sugaring off. She said they could only do it at that time of year because it had to be when the days were warm enough for the sap to flow and the nights cold enough to freeze it.

“Sounds perfectly logical to me,” I told her, “only I can’t figure out where the spigot is. What do we do? Twist off a branch?”

I thought that was pretty amusing, but Dinah just rolled her eyes. “Very funny,” she said. “No, what we do is make a hole.” She went on to explain. We would drill a hole in the trunk of the tree, then put a spile (that’s sort of like a spigot) into the hole. After that we’d hang a bucket from the spile. The spile directs the sap out of the tree and into the bucket.

Of course, back then I didn’t know as much about the whole process as I do now. “That’s all there is to maple syrup?” I asked. “We just go get it from the tree?”

“No way!” Dinah told me. “What we get from the tree is sap. That’s like very watery syrup. In fact, you can taste it and you’ll hardly be able to figure out what it is. No, what we do then is boil it. And boil it. And boil it.” You see, it turns out that it can take fifty gallons of sap to make one gallon of maple syrup! It takes even more boiling to turn the maple syrup into maple sugar. But Dinah insisted
that all that work was definitely worth it—and now that I’ve learned so much about the whole process, I can say that I agree with her. Maple syrup and sugar are the best!

But I still hadn’t learned that yet. In fact, I was so busy thinking about how I had to remember to read
To Kill a Mockingbird
while I was there that I almost missed what Dinah said next. Luckily I tuned in just in time, because it was very interesting and informative. She was explaining the connection between sugaring off and her riding class (since she had mentioned in her letter that her riding class would be doing the sap collecting). She said that the owner of her stable, Mr. Daviet, bought the land the stable is on without even realizing that it was just packed with sugar maples. When he figured it out, he decided to start the Sugar Hut as an offshoot business. He even named the place Sugarbush Stables, both after the closest town and, of course, because of the whole maple sugar connection. Pretty fascinating detail, huh?

Anyway, Dinah also told me about the contest we would be taking part in. Mr. Daviet’s students had divided up into teams of three. The team that collected the most sap (and helped turn it into the most syrup) would win the grand prize.

“What’s the grand prize?” I asked her. For a second I imagined things like a trip to Hawaii, a million dollars, a fancy house.… But I figured it wasn’t really anything like that.

Still, I was surprised when Dinah told me what the real
prize was. “The winning team will always have first pick of riding horses at classes all next summer,” she said.

“Outstanding!” I said, and I meant it. Maybe someone who doesn’t ride wouldn’t understand, but being able to ride your favorite horse in every class is truly a terrific prize.

I was ready to get started right away, and so was Dinah. She said the weather was perfect for setting out the buckets. “You can meet Betsy Hale, our teammate for the competition,” she said, “and then we can get started.”

“Today?” I asked.

Dinah grinned. “No time like the present!”

I grinned back. I hadn’t seen Dinah for a long time, but if I had ever forgotten why we were such good friends (I hadn’t), I remembered now. We think the same way. Neither of us likes to sit around and wait for the fun to start. We like to get out there and start it ourselves! I guess you could chalk that up to our natural exuberance.

We stopped at Dinah’s house long enough to drop off my stuff and change clothes. Then we headed to the Sugar Hut. I’d like to take a moment right here to give you an idea about what the Sugar Hut is like and how I felt when I first saw it.

We actually didn’t spend much time at the Sugar Hut that day. We had other things to do. The first order of business was for me to meet Betsy Hale, the third member of our team. She has dark brown curly hair and a really cool smile that makes deep dimples in her round cheeks. I liked her right away. She was that kind of person.

“Are we ready to start?” Dinah asked her after Betsy and I had met.

“Mr. Daviet has been sending out teams on snowshoes,” Betsy said.

They explained that we were all supposed to go out on snowshoes when we first put in the spiles. It sounded like slow going to me, especially since I’d never used snowshoes before. As it turned out, Betsy agreed. When I glanced at her, she had a mischievous sparkle in her eyes.

“Everybody but us has to go out on snowshoes,” she said. “See, I explained to Mr. Daviet about this friend you had visiting, and I told him all about the fact that she was somewhat lame …”

I caught on right away. I slung one arm over Dinah’s shoulders and pretended to have suddenly developed a limp in my right leg. “What’s the matter with me?” I asked Betsy.

Betsy giggled. “That’s what Mr. Daviet asked. I had to think fast. The first thing that came into my head was that you’d thrown a shoe, but I knew he wouldn’t fall for that. I just told him you were recovering from surgery. It seemed to sort of cover everything.”

The point of all this, as it turned out, was that we didn’t have to use snowshoes after all. We got to use a horse-drawn sleigh!

NOTE OF EXPLANATION: Why this wasn’t really cheating

It would be easy to look at our behavior and think we were just lying to get ahead of everyone else. But if you think about it, that isn’t really true. You see, we were getting a later start than most of the other teams because of the time my plane got in. Also, everyone on the other teams lived in Vermont. They all knew their way around the woods (on snowshoes or otherwise) and how to work the sap-collecting equipment. I, however, was a visitor from the South, with much less experience with snow and
none whatsoever with maple syrup (except on my pancakes). So we were really just evening things out.

Betsy explained that her sister, Jodi, would be there any minute with the sleigh. Jodi worked at Sugarbush Stables. Dinah told me that Jodi was a really great rider.

“She’s not all that great,” Betsy interrupted.

“Well, she’s better than we are,” Dinah said, “and she gets to spend all her time at the stable—”

“Except for the time she
says
she’s at the stable, when she’s really with a boyfriend,” Betsy finished for her.

“And she helps in class and she can ride whenever she wants to and she told me that she’d take me on the Rocky Road Trail one of these days,” Dinah said.

I could tell even then that Dinah and Betsy were similar in a lot of ways and agreed about most things. The big exception was Betsy’s sister, Jodi. Having several siblings myself, I could sort of see where Betsy was coming from. Maybe to her having an older sister seemed just as unnecessary to a full and satisfactory life as having three annoying brothers did to me.

I didn’t think too much about that just then, though, because I heard a wonderful sound floating toward us at that moment. It was a sound I had only heard once before—on the Starlight Ride at Pine Hollow on Christmas Eve, when Max rode through the fields in a horse-drawn sleigh. It was the sound of sleigh bells!

I turned and saw a sleigh coming toward us on the packed
snow of the wooded road. A large workhorse was pulling it, and the bells on the reins chimed merrily every time the girl who was driving moved her hands.

All of a sudden I had the weird but wonderful feeling that I hadn’t just traveled up the East Coast from Virginia to Vermont. No, I had also traveled backward in time a century or two. It was a magical moment, and the only thing that could have made it even more perfect was if Carole and Lisa had been there to share it with me.