12. The next day, head out to the sugar camp, and take the lid off that second barrel. It is empty. Pick your jaw up off your chest, turn the barrel over, and see a tiny hole in the snow. Ponder it for a while, and conclude that there is a miniscule leak along the seam of this plastic barrel. You’ve somehow lost 55 gallons of sap into the snow. And that first 55 gallons? It’s still frozen. You head back to the house, where you open a beer, even though it is 8 a.m.

13. Wait two weeks, until early April. The temperature warms again. The sap is running. Collect another 55 gallons in your second storage barrel—only this time you drape a plastic garbage bag inside the barrel to prevent leaks. The snow is only two feet deep now, so collecting sap is practically a leisure activity! It’s like shuffleboard, or tiddlywinks! Life is a dream!

14. It’s again time to boil, but you can’t wait for the weekend—that’s when you’re traveling on business. So you must boil during the week, while you’re finalizing the materials for the meeting. You will receive and respond to an email approximately every 90 seconds, and will fit in the sugaring by running out to your sugar camp in a panic every 45 minutes or so to throw more moldy wood on the fire, see how things are progressing, and say a prayer.

15. The sap isn’t quite boiling, but it is steaming, and seems to be shrinking in volume. Keep adding more sap to the pan, and wood to the fire, while the cellphone in your pocket rings, and rings, and … You have built your arch so that the prevailing winds from the west will blow the smoke away. Today the prevailing winds are from the east. Never mind.

16. It’s now 7 p.m. on the busiest day of your year. You have been boiling for 13 hours and have near-syrup in your pan. Ask your teenage son to help you transfer it to the nice finishing pan you bought from Amazon. Your teenage son will drop his side of the sugaring pan, spilling about a third of the near-syrup you have spent all day making into the fire. Never mind.

17. Bring your finishing pan into the house, put it on the stove, and continue boiling. Wait, what’s that? It looks like your finishing pan has a leak. How could that be? You bought it from Amazon! And yet it’s dripping sugary fluid onto the ceramic stovetop. Wait, wasn’t that the one thing that the manufacturer said you shouldn’t do? It seems like the sugary syrup is etching holes into the surface of the stovetop. And the steam seems to be liquefying the grease on the overhead fan, which is now dripping into the pan. Turn off the stove, clean up the stovetop, put the pan in the basement where it can’t hurt anything, and collapse weeping into bed.

18. Okay, it’s the next day, and now you’ve got a leaky pan with about 5 gallons of near-syrup. What to do? Drag out that hotplate from the basement, set it up outside, put the pan on it, and start cooking. Meantime, keep up with that J-O-B—you know, the one that pays the bills. This is the second-busiest day of the year, and you will receive another 150 emails that require instant responses. Check in on the pan cooking on the hotplate. If only it weren’t 15 degrees outside, it would probably be boiling. Keep it slowly steaming all day long.