One day I asked Bruce, “If your father was silent about your return and your mother begged you not to do it, why did you come back?” For a moment Bruce’s face reddened and his eyes went wide, like I was a teacher calling on him in English class. But then the look turned to amusement, which I thought was the difference between then and now.“I wanted to prove I could do it better than him,” he said.In 1965, a few months after Ken Bascom became a full-time sugarmaker, an article about him and his family appeared in a magazine called Food Marketing in New England, published by the First National Food Stores. The story took the form of a defense, and celebrated the farmer and his wife who were making a go of maple syrup production against the claims of a city dweller who stated that it was a thing of the past, strictly for fuddy-duddies, that young people didn’t care about it anymore. “‘Well,’ we said, ‘it is old, as years go, one of the few arts taught the white man by his Indian predecessors on this Continent.
