Easter Hatch

These words, I am certain, are new to many readers. This event, years ago, was held every Easter Sunday. We kids would take a dozen or more eggs plus some bread, etc., hike out into the hills and valleys. There we would cook the eggs in an old tin can and have our feast of Easter eggs.

If Easter came early enough, we would then make our annual visit to a maple syrup camp where we all would help the farmer to gather his daily supply of maple sap from the old wooden keelers which he had placed at the base of every maple tree. They would be emptied into a large tank which was fastened on a large sled. The farmer would drive his team of big dapple greys around the maple grove until we filled the tank. Then he would return to the camp where the sap was pumped into the large vats inside the shed. The vats were set over a large fire pit into which slab wood, hauled from a nearby sawmill, would be thrown into the fire to keep up a constant temperature. The steam from the boiling vats could be seen for a long distance.

The farmer's wife would always make a large amount of maple taffy for everyone. Sometimes if we drank too much of the real sweet water, we would suffer the same effects as a double dose of Epsom salts. I'll let you ponder over where we headed for on our way home.

I remember on one occasion, one of the boys wore his new Easter hat on one of these trips. While his attention was focused on the boiling eggs, another slipped up behind him holding a fresh egg in his hand. A second 'friend' quickly came up and smashed the hand and egg down on the new hat. That ended the Easter Hatch for the day as everybody took for the hills to get away from our infuriated buddy. He walked home on the roadway while the rest of us kept to the fields beyond the range of his stone missiles.

When several of us get together we now laugh over the times we used to have when we were kids. We still reminisce over the old sugar camp which is no longer there, neither is the farmer and his gracious wife. Only the maple trees remain, but we still have our memories.