Sweet Spots | Inside Yankee
This is how spring sneaks up on us in New England. The snow softens, and skiers discover March is the kindest month of all. The first songbirds land in our yards, and we think … It’s coming. By early March, we see sap buckets fastened to maples, plastic tubing threading through the forests, smoke pouring from sugarhouses.
This is how spring sneaks up on us in New England. The snow softens, and skiers discover March is the kindest month of all. The first songbirds land in our yards, and we think … It’s coming. By early March, we see sap buckets fastened to maples, plastic tubing threading through the forests, smoke pouring from sugarhouses.
Here in New Hampshire, I need only to walk to the edge of Yankee’s lawn and across the road to the campus of a small boarding school to know that a seasonal change is afoot. Dublin School enrolled its first students in 1935, the year Yankee published its first issue. At lunchtime, a few of us often stroll through its property, passing a long stand of trees that in maple season hold dozens of old-fashioned metal sap buckets, usually filled to overflowing. Deeper in the school’s woods, sap flows through tubing from hundreds more maples, eventually dripping thousands of gallons into collection tanks. The school maintains a sugarhouse where students, teachers, and even alums boil off the sap until what remains is nature’s great gift to waffles and pancakes.
It’s a scene repeated in hundreds of sugarhouses across New England, and if you’ve never stepped inside one to breathe in the sweet steam, you have missed one of our region’s signature experiences. Maple season is worth celebrating—so if you don’t happen to have a sugarhouse right next door, we have compiled a bucket list of beloved and unexpected ways to tap into this tasty tradition [“Eight Ways to Make the Most of Maple Season,” p. 73].
Inside these pages you will also find stories of New Englanders of all ages and backgrounds who have persisted in finding their singular sweet spot and, in doing so, enhance our lives.
Writer Julia Clancy remembers the childhood enchantment of riding in one of the Swan Boats in Boston’s Public Garden [“Back in the Paddle,” p. 16], an entertainment launched in 1877 by Irish immigrants Robert and Julia Paget. Since then, there has always been a Paget family member to watch over the smiles of the passengers, who—at least for 15 minutes or so—can leave the modern world in their wake.
Massachusetts researcher Greg Skomal has devoted his life to understanding great white sharks, using his dramatic fieldwork to shed light on ways to protect both sharks and swimmers, now and in the future [“The Shark Detective,” p. 88].
A teenager from Angola who moved to Maine in 2016, João Victor turned to poetry recitation as a way to express feelings that many of his fellow asylum seekers cannot voice. His quest to be a national champion in a language he did not speak or understand when he first arrived here is also the story of a bond between teacher and student, and it demonstrates what can be achieved in the face of seemingly impossible odds [“The Unfinished Journey of João Victor,” p. 98].
So come inside, where both springtime and inspiration await.
Mel Alleneditor@yankeemagazine.com
Mel Allen
Mel Allen is the fifth editor of Yankee Magazine since its beginning in 1935. His first byline in Yankee appeared in 1977 and he joined the staff in 1979 as a senior editor. Eventually he became executive editor and in the summer of 2006 became editor. During his career he has edited and written for every section of the magazine, including home, food, and travel, while his pursuit of long form story telling has always been vital to his mission as well. He has raced a sled dog team, crawled into the dens of black bears, fished with the legendary Ted Williams, profiled astronaut Alan Shephard, and stood beneath a battleship before it was launched. He also once helped author Stephen King round up his pigs for market, but that story is for another day. Mel taught fourth grade in Maine for three years and believes that his education as a writer began when he had to hold the attention of 29 children through months of Maine winters. He learned you had to grab their attention and hold it. After 12 years teaching magazine writing at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, he now teaches in the MFA creative nonfiction program at Bay Path University in Longmeadow, Massachusetts. Like all editors, his greatest joy is finding new talent and bringing their work to light.
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