The curator at the Fairbanks Museum said, Mrs. Gauthier, we have been waiting fifty years for this call. Your Paul came in once, long ago, and told us that someday the loggers would come, and that when they did, we were to show his wife what is in his grandfathers trunk.
I told her about the logging man and his pink ribbons, the timber rights sold in 1931, four hundred trees coming down in April.
Come and see, she said. In 1931, your husbands grandfather did sell the timber rights, it is true. But two years later, in 1933, he bought them back, every acre, and recorded the deed, and the logging company only ever found the first half of the story. The deed that returned the timber rights to your family has been in our archive, in his trunk, for fifty years.
The envelope pasted into Pauls syrup ledger held the 1931 bill of sale, and the museum held the 1933 deed that undid it.
They told me to buy my maple at the Price Chopper, and my husbands grandfather had bought back our own trees ninety years ago and left the proof in a museum.
The museum gave me a certified copy, and my lawyer sent it to the logging company, and the pink ribbons came off the trees by the end of the week. Nobody cut a single maple.
I still tap four hundred trees every March, even though my hands do not work like they used to. The whole town still comes for pancakes and our syrup. And Pauls ledger sits open on the shelf in the sugar shack, the gallons and the grades and the years, and now one more story at the very back.