I slid out from behind the wheel and gently closed my car door. It
had taken weeks for the local mechanic to repair my baby after it
lost a cage match with a cassowary but it had been worth the wait.
If anything, my vintage MG Midget was looking, and driving, better
than ever. All those weeks of tooling around in the fam- ily’s
dreaded spare car, the Clunker, had been worth it. I gave the
convertible’s soft top a little pat and let my fin- gers run along
the smooth shiny new turquoise paint, then headed into the most
photographed building in New Hampshire for some breakfast.

Jessie Crockett

To the best of all local knowledge, the Stack Shack is the only
pancake stack shaped building in the world. It’s been featured in
travel magazines, cooking magazines, and even a book of odd
buildings. The place is built with enough curves and layers to make
any structural updates intimidating and costly, which is why Piper
was able to buy it on the cheap when she was barely out of high
school. She loves the Stack, which she knew she wanted to own and
run ever since the first time her parents took her there for
breakfast as a small child.

It’s conveniently located just off Sugar Grove’s main street with
plenty of on- and off-street parking, which it needs. The Stack, as
it’s called by locals, is standing-room-only on weekends and
holidays. It gets crowded to capacity on weekdays at breakfast and
lunch, too.

The smell of fried potatoes and sizzling bacon filled the air. I
glanced up at the specials written on a section of wall covered with
chalkboard paint in the shape of a maple leaf. Piper stood behind
the counter, a coffeepot in her hand, looking for all the world like
she’d lost her best friend. Which I knew for a fact she hadn’t since
I was standing right in front of her.

“So what’s good this morning?” I asked. Piper looked up from staring
at the laminate counter in front of her like it held the answer to
all the world’s problems.

“Nothing.” Piper always had a great suggestion for ordering off her
menu. She never said nothing. If the spe- cial didn’t seem all that
special, you could be certain the pancakes would be.

“That doesn’t sound like you. What’s up?” I hoisted myself onto a
stool at the counter and gave my friend all my attention.

“It’s more what’s down. Profits.”

Maple Mayhem

“At the Stack?” Business being slow at the Stack Shack was about as
likely as successfully training a moose to ride a bicycle. The Stack
had been profitable even during the Depression, when it had been
built as a roadside attraction with the idea of separating a
reluctant popula- tion from what little extra money they had. Things
had only improved since then for the country and the Stack. “No.
Jill and Dean’s profits.” That made more sense.

Jill Hayes and her brother, Dean, ran another sugarhouse in town,
but their operation was much smaller than my own, Greener Pastures.
Back at Thanksgiving Jill had lost her access to some trees she had
tapped for years and it had cut way down on her ability to produce
enough sap.

Her own property wasn’t all that large and with forty gallons of sap
required to produce one gallon of finished syrup, you needed to tap
a lot of trees. It hadn’t helped that last year had been terrible
for production. You need warm days and cold nights to get the sap to
really run and, unfortunately, Mother Nature had only been suffer-
ing from hot flashes. No sugar makers had done well and for those
already running on close margins, it had been a disaster.

“Do they think they’ll be able to hold on through this coming
season?” I asked. Piper was plugged into what was going on in town
because of her position as owner of the most popular eatery in Sugar
Grove, but also because Dean was her current winter fling. Every
year Piper has a winter romance and she takes it very seriously
while it lasts.

Jessie Crockett

“Dean was just in here talking about how tight things have gotten
with the business and that they may decide to stop producing. He
said he’s trying to convince Jill to sell the property even before
the sugaring season gets underway.” Jill and Dean had inherited
their land from their parents, who had died several years before in
a car accident. Jill had finished raising Dean and one of the ways
they had made ends meet was by producing syrup. “I thought Jill said
she was going to wait it out to see if the maple cooperative would
make enough of a difference and then decide?”

“She wants to try to stick it out but she isn’t sure if they can.
Dean says the bank’s sending threatening letters and if it weren’t
winter, the power company would have cut off the electricity for
lack of payment.”

“I knew their name was listed in the last town report as one of the
owners behind on their property taxes but I didn’t know things had
gotten that bad.” I was glad, and not for the first time, that the
Greene family income didn’t depend on syrup making. Greener Pastures
was one of the largest producers in town. I was hoping we would grow
to be one of the largest in the state.