Sugaring season is conveniently “sandwiched” between Purim and Pesach. When the nights are still below freezing and the days sunny and warm, the sap begins to flow up and down, coursing through the veins of mature sugar maples ready to be tapped, the sap eager to be boiled down into sweet maple syrup. The mountains are a patchwork quilt of snow and clearing and streams - swollen with runoff - roar with a nervous energy as their waters seek the rivers below.

Actually, the juxtaposition of sugaring to Purim - Pesach is quite serendipitous. For just as Purim showed us the concealed face of Hashem, so too, the clear cool sap - containing 98% water – hides the true sweetness which is only revealed after “boiling off” the excess. By the time we get to Pesach – the ultimate in your face, Old Testament big ticket miracle kinda holiday – the water is a distant memory leaving us with only the rich syrups with such exotic monikers as “dark amber” – as much a revelation as a revolution!

Pesach on the farm presents a unique set of challenges. Remember, by this time we’ve got a wee bit of cabin fever and the firewood is running real low (we are usually cutting wood in “real time” at this point). The biggest challenge is the chametz – leavened products. A farm is chametz central! There is chametz everywhere. So, while we are easily weaned off of chametz (and I don’t believe in Pesach cakes and cookies just on principal – I can wait thank you!) the animals require a more deliberate transitioning over in their diets (we don’t want the turkeys to have to go “cold people”!) Usually this means switching them over gradually to whatever they will be eating so as not to disrupt their diet or egg laying. Animals are allowed to eat kitniyos so we slowly move the dogs over to a premium food and the birds to cracked corn and vegetables (they free range for much of their diet anyway but there’s not always that much green by Pesach.

A wonderful win-win solution to our dilemma presented itself several years ago. We decided to contact our friends who were preparing large seders (anywhere from 65-200 people!) and ask them to save all the edible scraps for us – greens, carrot peels etc. So not only were we “doing the mitzvah” but we were keeping hundreds of pounds of otherwise compostable materials out of the landfill! Who knew that our quest to be chametz free could turn into an important lesson on recycling!

The seders themselves are beautiful. The table looks like it is fit for a king. Family and friends (and the occasional stranger or lost student – remember - we walk the walk too!) guarantee a free-for all where everyone is a winner! Hand made organic whole wheat and spelt shmura matza (and you though cocaine was expensive?) and a great assortment of wines help us to get out of those narrow places to a much, much better one. We even retell the story of our own Pesach deliverance. Allow me to share a “taste” with you.

Several years ago, on the eve of the seder, we had a huge sap run. The sap, which typically drips exxcruuuuciaaaatingly slowwwwly was now drip, drip dripping at a rapidly quickening clip, filling and overflowing the hundreds of buckets hanging in our sugarbush, I called all my friends to come help us collect and with their help we collected hundreds and hundreds of gallons of sap. As the day grew late, I thanked everyone and sent them home. No one works on the holiday on the farm – not us, not the neighbors, not the animals. I ran in and showered, put on my white kittel and started the seder. Over the next two days, which were unseasonably warm and sunny, all the sap spoiled. We lost everything. Being a small town (600 people plus the odd dog), word of our loss traveled quickly. Someone passed a snide comment “What kind of G-d would allow that to happen while you’re doing His thing?” I quickly responded “No one ever got hurt doing a mitzvah”. But we were hurting on the inside and figuring there had to be a reason for this catastrophe.

A few months later, I got a phone call from a friend who worked in the VT Department of Agriculture. He wanted to know if we were still selling our adopt-a-tree packages. (www.sweetwhisperfarms.com/rockmaple) I told him we were. He mentioned that he got a call from O – The Oprah Magazine and that they were doing a feature on maple and wanted to highlight an adopt-a-tree program. After a few preliminary calls from Oprah’s people (I had her people call my people) a small sidebar story featuring our farm and the tree adoption program ran on the last page of the magazine. Well, the phones started ringing. And ringing. And ringing some more. It rang off the hook for months (G-d bless that woman!) Finally, after sugaring was done, we drove into town, our pickup truck groaning under the load of the boxes to be shipped. I happened to see the guy who passed the comment. I pointed to the truck and said “See? No one ever got hurt doing a mitzvah.”

As an aside, my daughter home-schooled recently for a while due to illness. As a writing assignment, she wrote to the “O” magazine describing how it had played a part in our miracle. A couple of months later she got a letter from Oprah’s people telling her they were running the letter in the magazine. And guess what? The phones started ringing. . . . Remember - no one ever got hurt doing a mitzvah!”

Have a happy and chametz–free Pesach!