Yesterday, I was approached by a couple when they noticed our license plate, and the man bellowed: “Florida!  What are you doing up here?”  My husband Ray, never one to pass up an opportunity to crack wise, replied stoically, “We’re here for the weather.”  The couple eyed us suspiciously and wandered off, apparently deciding it better not to engage the crazy people.
At the risk of perpetuating the myth that most crazy people don’t know they are, I’m going to insist that we truly are not crazy.  We love Minnesota!  Weather and all.
We arrived in 1995 with the ambitious goal of carving a self-sufficient homestead out of our own little piece of wilderness.  The plan was to have a cabin in the woods where we could retreat from the 95-degree/95% humidity of Florida summers.  The dream of going off-grid and living off the land was intoxicating.  Over the years, the dream has evolved and taken on a life of its own.
Back in those days, when land was relatively cheap, we purchased eighty acres of swamp with a creek running through the middle and a tiny patch of high ground next to the county road where we could build our “camp.”  For a while, we roughed it in a tent a few weeks each summer.  Then we splurged and bought a used 1989 camper.  We filled water jugs in town and lived by fire and lamplight.  It was peaceful in our arboreal heaven, but most importantly, it was cool, and by cool, I mean it wasn’t Florida in August.
The northern half of our property was comprised of gorgeous upland timber – oak, sugar maple, aspen, and basswood.  But, because of the swamp, we couldn’t access it without crossing our neighbor’s land.  There was an old logging road on the property line, and when we asked John, our neighbor, about whose side it was on, he responded, “That road stays quite handily on my side.”  He allowed us to use it, but only on foot.  We took long walks with our dogs when the autumn leaves blazed and wished we could build our cabin there.
A few years later, John invited us out for pizza, and we knew something was up.  Over dinner, he proposed selling us a forty acre parcel – including the old logging road.  He knew how important it was to us, and we paid more for that forty than we did for the eighty, but it was worth it.
Overjoyed that now we had access to all of our beautiful acreage, we wandered the woods with new eyes.  And one of the first things we noticed was, boy, we sure had a lot of sugar maples!
That was the beginning of the Big Idea.  We began to investigate what it would take to convert our hardwood forest to a working sugarbush.  We went to Vermont in the spring and learned in great detail about making maple syrup.  We joined the Minnesota Maple Syrup Producers Association.  We attended conferences and drooled over huge evaporators and reverse osmosis machines.  We mapped out where mainlines and tubing would connect tree to tree and carry the sap effortlessly back to the sugarhouse.
Nearly a decade later, we finally tapped fifty trees and made syrup for the first time, but without the benefit of all that high tech equipment.  Instead, we hung gallon jugs on the trees, and planned to collect the sap in a five-gallon bucket using the four-wheeler.  Then we were hit with the snowiest April in years.  So we wound up trudging through the woods in snowshoes, dragging the five-gallon bucket in a child’s fluorescent-orange toboggan.  Fortunately, the bucket had a screw-on lid, because I can’t tell you how many times it tipped over and dove into three feet of snow.  We repeatedly dug it out and schlepped it back to the barn where we dumped the sap in my great-grandfather’s thirty-gallon copper kettle.  Over an open fire, it took eight hours to boil each day’s collection down to about a gallon of syrup.
Ray took Mason jar quarts of maple syrup to work with him, and it was snapped up by his co-workers within minutes.  One guy carried his jar around all day, showing it off like it was a newborn baby.
It was official – we were in business.  Since then, we’ve tried to find more ways we can turn our little farm into a going concern.  Maybe even be able to retire here someday and supplement our Social Security with a small farm income.  We’re working to expand the sugarbush, we sold a few Christmas trees, and our newest venture is growing and saving rare and unusual heirloom vegetable seeds.
In the meantime, we’ve built a barn and a couple outbuildings, but we still live in that same little camper.  (But not in the dead of winter!)  We brought in electricity and drilled a well, because what once seemed like luxuries have become necessities as we get older.  It’s still primitive, but it’s our little piece of heaven on earth.