Nothing good comes from winter.

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It’s winter in my homeland of Michigan. For 4-5 months a year, it’s cold and dead. When there’s no snow on the ground (like most of this winter), the world is a stale brown as all the plants go dormant. The sun disappears for longer at night and hides behind clouds for most of the days.

Nothing good could come from winter.

But if you wander into the trees behind my house - you will need warm boots this time of year - and navigate down the south side of the lot you will run into a thick maple tree tucked next to the path. Journey a bit further and you will find more maples. There are dozens of small maple samplings, but it’s the mature ones you should pay attention to.

The maples look just as brown and lifeless as the rest of the forest and ground foliage, yet something hides beneath the surface. “Tapping” a maple tree involves drilling a small hole into the side of a mature trunk and inserting a metal spile. Pay attention, you might see maple sap begin to drip out before you’ve even finished drilling the hole.

We collect the sap into buckets and boil the sap down into a very highly concentrated liquid that we celebrate as maple syrup. We only tap 12 trees although there are plenty more around. Despite how dead and dry everything looks in the winter, a dozen maple trees produce too much sap for us to boil and store. There’s more than enough to go around. An abundance. With dozens more maple samplings growing up each year.

Here’s the thing.

The maple sap only “runs” and drips out of the taps because of the winter. It’s the hard freezes and traps the water and gasses into the center of the tree. When the temperature drifts above freezing during the day time (usually right about this time of year) those gasses in the center of the tree expand and push the sweet sap out of the tree.

Better have your tap ready. It’s worth collecting. It’s sweetest and best to collect it before the trees begin budding for spring.

Nothing good could come from winter?

Sometimes winter is the only way something good appears. During the winter there might be far more happening beneath the surface than you realize. And if you wait until you see evidence of spring, you might miss it.

You might be in the winter season. Either personally, or professionally. Your data team might be in the winter season.

Beauty can come from winter. You just need to know where to look.

I’m here,

Sawyer

from The Data Shop