Kurt Vonnegut used to say that there were actually six seasons in the year: winter, spring, summer, and fall...and "locking" and "unlocking."
"Locking," Vonnegut said, comes between fall and winter, when leaf-season is over and the world is hunkering down but real winter has yet to arrive. "Unlocking" comes at the end of the winter, when the world has begun to thaw, but you still haven't reached spring.
These two seasons tend to be bi-polar and confusing.
But if you live in the northern United States and have access to some woods, there's a fun thing you can do with the "unlocking" season...
Make maple syrup!
That's what I did when I was a kid.
The first thing you need to make maple syrup is some stuff — buckets, taps, hooks, a drill, a hammer, and a sap collection tank. A pickup truck helps, too.
Buckets are actually an old-fashioned and inefficient way to collect sap (you'll see why). These days, serious "sugaring" operations use vacuum tubes that whoosh sap straight from the trees to the sugar house. But you can still get tin buckets secondhand from specialty dealers. Ours are from Canada.
Our taps are the old-fashioned kind, too. The ones you use with vacuum tubes are thinner and made of plastic.
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