The mounds of snow on our front lawns are starting to shrink, the morning air has gone from bracing to crisp, and hints of green will soon make their annual introduction.  Across the state, another thing is happening: smokestacks are stirring to life and syrup season is in full swing.

If April marks much needed renewal and rebirth, it also marks peak time to visit one of New Hampshire’s 70 or so sugarhouses and load up on sticky, syrupy, pancake-topping perfection. I am always struck by folks who cede syrup supremacy to our neighbors in Vermont. Visit Lucien and Muriel Blais at Bisson’s Sugarhouse up in Berlin for a maple sundae, Roy Hutchinson’s half-century-old shop in Canterbury, or the folks at Parker’s in Mason for a stack of flapjacks and tell me our Granite State syrup is not among the sweetest rewards nature can offer.

Syrup is as ingrained in NH culture as granite. Legend has it, Native Americans were the first to discover the sweet stuff after a chief hurled his tomahawk at a maple tree and sap started flowing. Today, you can’t traverse a quarter mile of woods by the time April arrives and avoid the dozens of buckets hanging from tapped trunks, either from local sugarhouses or folks running home operations.

Each year, my wife and I proudly distribute gallons of NH syrup as gifts in their distinctive glass bottles. There’ll always be a straggler we have to convert from the cloying, corn-syrupy supermarket stuff. Once they try our amber elixir, most are hooked for good.  Maine can have its lobster; Massachusetts its cranberries; and Vermont can claim to be the syrup king, at least in volume. For our maple sugar, decent, hard-working folks and so many other natural wonders, I can think of no sweeter place than New Hampshire.