800 Words on Maple Syrup and Wiper Fluid
You may be thinking, is he really postcarding about washer fluid behavior?
Where we live, there are two things worth paying attention to that signal a change in the weather this time of year. One is the amount of windshield wiper fluid dispensed while driving. Temperatures are moderating and snow melt on the roads is creating a damp glaze thrown back at you by vehicles in front. Fifty percent of the roads around here are dirt, including the one we live on. The surface of those is getting soft. As temperatures climb, they will turn to mud for a while, which means a steady application of brown paste to the car, kicking up to the windows.
You can go to the car wash if you like. Yesterday there was a line outside our local one of at least ten cars. I moved on in the truck, but my wife took our Subaru through and crept back home to preserve the appearance of cleanliness for as long as possible. It makes no difference to the car, of course, except maybe as a rust preventative. It is mainly a mental thing. An old friend used to say a clean car drives better, and I agree with him. A clean house feels better to live in. A cake sometimes looks too good to slice. There can be something in the value of appearances.
The second thing worth paying attention to is maple syrup buckets appearing on the side of trees. I passed several this morning driving with Huckleberry to the rail trail for our walk. Warmer days and cold nights mean the sap is beginning to run, the first agricultural product of the year.
Is anything more iconic to New England than a maple syrup bucket hanging off a tree? Lobster? A lobster boat? If I was still an innkeeper I would point to the country inn as the most iconic feature of New England, which I am sure I have before. Maple syrup buckets are up there.
Sadly, most buckets have been replaced by blue plastic tubing snaking through groves of trees. This is much easier on the syrup producers, but it is a spiritual letdown for the rest of us. Tubing will never rise to the iconic bucket level, enticing the senses in the same way as the uncut cake or clean car against a drab March exterior. It belongs in the same category as telephone poles and wires. We may not be conscious of them every moment, but when we are, we do not say, admiringly, what a lovely stretch of telephone poles and wire.
The person who introduced the idea of using gravity to deliver sap directly to the sugar house through a network of tubes probably got a medal. I am delighted for that person. It was a good idea. I am just saying . . . well, you know what I am saying. And we cannot do without maple syrup.
Regarding the other necessity of windshield wiper fluid, our Ford Ranger offers what the manual refers to as a “courtesy wipe” after calling for a squirt. Pushing the button dispenses the washer fluid while the blades sweep twice. There is a pause, followed by a third, “courtesy wipe.” It was a new feature to me when we bought the truck nearly fourteen years ago. I was unused to that sort of bold innovation from Ford. But it succeeds at catching the bothersome thread of fluid that always drains down from the top of the windshield after you have cleaned it.
You may be thinking, is he really postcarding about washer fluid behavior? But you know the thread I mean that intrudes from just above the one o’clock radius of the wiper arc, the one so pervasive Ford engineers designed a solution. Yes, I am postcarding about it. In fact, if I were standing in front of a writing class I might send them home with an assignment to return with five hundred words on windshield wiper fluid.
I could manage such an essay recalling a few winter episodes on the upstate New York thruway in my old Chevy Vega, or Ford Gran Torino (bigger on the inside than my dorm room), having failed to pay attention to the wiper fluid, looking through the equivalent of a muddy basement window, white-knuckling as close as possible to the tractor-trailer in front to try and capture the spray coming off its wheels. Or pulling onto the shoulder and dosing the windshield with handfuls of snow. Or, on slower roads, even grabbing snow off the roof of the car while driving and applying it as best I could before flipping on the wipers.
There you have it, two unlikely partners this time of year to tell you the seasons are changing. For good reason, they both come in jugs.