The father of Richard is named Walter Lowell, a retired dentist from Greenwich with a bow tie he wears even on Thanksgiving, and he held the cream envelope away from his body as if it contained a wasp. “It is the same company, Walter,” I said. “Open it, if you like.” He drew out three folded pages with a gold logo at the top. A maple leaf in a circle. “That is the contract of sale. In August, I sold Green Mountain Sugarworks to the food company in Chicago that makes the syrup in your pantry. Six million three hundred thousand dollars. I kept the land.” I reached for the gravy. “Until Diane sold forty acres of it without telling me.”
Walter Lowell read the first page, and the second, and set them down very softly beside his plate. The wood stove popped. Outside, the first snow of the year was coming down on the sugarbush, big and slow and quiet, the way it does in Vermont when the world has decided to be gentle. “Agnes,” he said, “I had no idea.” I said, “Neither did Diane. I was a woman who lived in a farmhouse with a wood stove and a worn out Subaru. I let her think it.” I looked across the table at my daughter. “I wanted to see who she would be.”
Diane laid down the carving knife. She is fifty, a handsome woman with the forehead of her father and her own sharp nose, and for a moment I saw her trying on three different faces, indignant, wounded, apologetic, like a girl choosing dresses. At last she settled on none of them. Her shoulders sagged. “Mom,” she said, “the resort was going to take it anyway. They had the survey. They told me that if I did not sell the easement, they would bring condemnation proceedings. I thought I was protecting you.” I said, “Diane, the town clerk told me there was no such proceeding. There never was.” She looked down at her plate.
A cream envelope with a gold maple logo brought a retired dentist to a Thanksgiving table and gave one sugarmaker the evening to bring her daughter back to the sugarbush.
Richard put the easement on the table. He is a gaunt, serious man with half moon glasses, and his voice was very quiet. “Diane,” he said, “you told me the ninety thousand dollars was an inheritance from your aunt Marie. I used it for the down payment on the cottage in Maine.” She did not answer. He took off his glasses. “I put my name on a deed for a cottage bought with the trees of your mother.” His hands trembled. “I cannot sleep in that house, Diane. I will not.” She started to cry. Not elegantly. Not for effect. It came out of her in great, ugly gasps, and her mother in law turned her face to the window.
I thought of Harold. I thought of my husband in the sugarbush at dawn in March, with his bucket and his red wool cap, laying his hand against the trunk of the oldest maple on the ridge, and saying, in his low, courtly way, Good morning, old girl. I thought of Diane at seven, in a yellow raincoat, running down the rows of tapped trees, counting buckets aloud, and shrieking with joy when she reached a hundred. I stood up. My knees ached. I went around the table and put my arms around my daughter, and she clung to me like a child.
“Diane,” I said into her hair, “listen. I am angry. I am more angry than I have ever been. But I will not let this destroy us.” I drew back and held her by the shoulders. “Here is what we will do. Richard and you will sell the cottage in Maine, and you will repay the ninety thousand dollars to me. I will use it to buy back the easement from the resort, if they will sell it. If they will not, I will use it to plant three thousand new maples on the land that is left.” She nodded, weeping. “And I will revoke the power of attorney. Tomorrow. Before breakfast.”
The resort, to my astonishment, agreed to sell. Their lawyer was a young man with a gentle telephone voice, and he said that the easement had been recorded on a misunderstanding, that the board had never intended to cause trouble, and that the road could go around the sugarbush if I would grant them a thin strip at the bottom. I said I would think about it. I thought about it for a week, and then I walked down to the property line in my boots with my cane and saw the orange flags, the survey stakes, the bulldozer. I pulled up every stake myself, one by one.
The thin strip was granted, at a fair price, and the oldest maples were saved. In April, when the sap began to run, Diane drove up from Connecticut alone, on a Wednesday, in a pair of borrowed boots. She did not call first. I found her standing in the sugarbush with her hand on the great maple, the oldest on the ridge, her eyes shut. I walked up quietly. She heard me and turned. “Mom,” she said, “I could not remember the last time I had touched one.” I said, “They remember you.” She laughed, wetly, and wiped her face with a mitten.
We tapped together that week, as we had when she was small. She drilled the holes, I tapped in the spiles, and she hung the buckets, which she found, to her surprise, she had not forgotten how to do. By evening, when the sap began to drip, ringing softly into the tin, she sat on an overturned bucket and listened with her chin on her hands. “It sounds like rain,” she said. I said, “It sounds like money, sweetheart. And patience.” She looked at me, and her whole face changed. “Mom, will you teach me to boil?” I said, “I have been waiting forty years for you to ask.”
The syrup that year was dark and sweet, with a smoky edge from the wood fire, and she bottled the first quart herself, in an old glass jar, and wrote on the label with a marker: Agnes and Diane, first run. She set it on my kitchen table. The following Thanksgiving, I poured a little of it over my sweet potatoes, the way Harold liked, and the table was full. Diane carved the turkey. Richard said the grace. And the snow came down, big and slow and quiet, on forty acres of old maples that had come perilously close to being a road, and that stood, as they always had, without a word, in the dark.
