3       TAP SAP 

KEY CONCEPTS:  flexibility, adaptability, patience, stealth, seasons, savoring life’s sweetness, navigating challenges gracefully, animal messages.

MESSAGE:  In the frigid cold of winter, folks tap maple trees to collect sap, then painstakingly begin the process of boiling it down. Evaporation eventually thickens it to the desired consistency for sirup, as it’s spelled in one key location along the Route.  You can’t rush this layered process, and you can’t begin until conditions are exactly right.  Consider the obstacles of winter:  cold weather brings hazards like snow, sleet and treacherous black ice.  But if you were hoping to taste this sweet and tasty treat, you must embrace flexibility.  You’ll endure both frozen nights and daytime thaws awaiting pressure to build, pushing sap up from the roots into your bucket. To everything there is a season…and patience teaches us the gifts of adaptability.  Cycles must run their course, dear traveler.

Speaking of cycles, it takes about 52 days for mother fox to give birth to fully formed, healthy kits.  She mates in winter, so her litter is born in the relative ease of spring.  In fall she stealthily hunts food and stores it, building up fat reserves for colder months while preparing to nurture developing offspring.  In quietude she unassumingly labors to introduce healthy kits into the world.  Like mama fox or sirup-makers, we, too, require patience.  Are you in such a hurry to reach your destination that you roar past a million little opportunities for joy?  Don’t take sweetness lightly; it takes about 40 gallons of sap to yield only one gallon of sirup.   When Tap Sap enters your reading, it carries a message: don’t pass up a single chance to savor life’s preciousness.  

RELATED SITES:  FUNKS GROVE PURE MAPLE SIRUP, SHIRLEY, IL.