Sap It to Me

April’s Maple serves a sugaring-season feast in Canaan

BY JORDAN BARRY jbarry@sevendaysvt.com

woman-owned, family-run maple business in the northeasternmost part of the Northeast Kingdom. Depending on the season, Lemay and her “Maple Ladies” — the business’ all-female crew — might be serving hungry snowmobilers, twisting creemees for campers, selling gallons of syrup to leafpeeping tourists or making maple candy in whimsical shapes for holiday season wholesale accounts.

The uninitiated might think that sugaring season, which April’s Maple is in the midst of now, is the busiest time of year.

“But they’re all busy,” Lemay, 48, said with a laugh.

When Lemay started April’s Maple, she didn’t plan on the business being her fulltime gig. Living in Boston, she was in the midst of a 17-year career at Deloitte, the large international accounting and consulting firm. But her mother and her five aunts had inherited an 813-acre plot on Canaan’s Cole Hill from their parents, and it was becoming a financial burden.

“There wasn’t anything on the property, and they were thinking about selling it,” Lemay said. She had spent time on the plot while growing up in Canaan, particularly around sugaring season. Every Easter, Lemay recalled, the family would trek into the woods to her grandfather’s sugarhouse. The kids grabbed buckets o the trees, and they all boiled the sap in a wood-fired evaporator with a ham hanging over it, letting the space — and the ham — slowly fill with maple steam. They finished the day with sugar on snow, of course.