I’ve lived in New England a really long time, more seasons than anyplace else. I’m not sure exactly why, but I treasure spring more each year. It’s as if this turn toward the sun, the warmth, the flow of water and sap and the initiation of green moves me more deeply each time we reach the longer days and birdsong and little girl dresses’ purple crocus shoots curled snug before they open
I promise that I’ll be drunk on the nectar of those delicate and bright flowers, the safety yellow forsythia, the orange and magenta azalea and the noble magnolia. Meantime, though, snowdrops send me to a delicious delirium, along with those first pristine snowdrops. I love when the ground starts to give a little and ice thins and disappears from the ponds. I love the lengthening days, the kids ditching jackets, the college students donning flip-flops. I love how when the thermometer hits 50 degrees in New England people flock to ice cream parlors. The way we turn to the sun could be seen as desperate or as demonstration of deep, abiding faith. Here, we announce with heads upturned, we made it.
And that’s the thing about this maple sugar season. Sunday morning, I drove up to Worthington to interview a potter named Hiroshi Nakayama. His work is mesmerizing, these beautiful seemingly organic objects—ones that look as if they’ve always existed—and he has a studio at the end of a dirt road that could be, for all intents and purposes when you’re headed there for the very first time and the snow’s melting and the mud season’s just beginning, at the end of the world. On the way there, I kept passing sugar shacks. I passed a big bonfire in Westhampton that may have been going for sugaring purposes. I passed loads of metal buckets on trees. Melt in New England makes its own category of sounds. The air softens and moistens. The sun presses down. The sky gets bluer. It takes an average of 40 gallons of sap for one of syrup. Maple syrup can be drawn from trees in other places, but somehow, it seems to defining of New England’s patience and grit and ultimate optimism.
Although Hiroshi Nakayama is Japanese, there’s something fitting about his workplace being tucked into the New England hills. He is quiet and seemed, if you can say this about someone you’ve briefly met, stoic. Like the trees that surround his house and studio, he seems planted by the mission of hands in clay, as if the work set down his roots for him.
A lot of people around here seem rooted in similar ways, what with the plethora of craftspeople and artists and farmers and wordsmiths and makers of things from the land or stewards of it. I was visiting the studio in order to write a story about a group of potters, the Hilltown 6. That community formed around the idea of a weekend’s worth of open studios fashioned like breadcrumbs through the forest into a tour. There are eight potters, now, tucked into the hilltowns—Cummington, Worthington, and Westhampton—and in July, you can visit them. The snow will be gone by then, the world verdant, the bounty so generous. Unlike this first hub-of-winter harvest, where so much sap makes so little syrup, imagine berries on bushes and zucchini explosion; imagine big ears of corn and all sorts of greens and herbs and the promise of apples and roots ahead.
When I walk outside and feel my being sponge up the sun, I am grateful for brightness and warmth and the moment when my body feels a little freer, unencumbered by cold, as if I, too, have some sap coursing through. When I turn to my work, in part it is to write about people rooted in myriad ways to this part of the world, I am grateful, too, to have put my roots here, and to tell their stories. I think that this time of year is condensed sweetness, and this place—for all its cold, for the ways it is hard—really is a particular, sometimes hard-won paradise.
