Friends, family line up to help at maple time

STRAFFORD—Keith Fifield stood atop his sugarhouse checking sap lines hung like telephone cables coming out of the woods behind his house. His father, Wayne, sat in the driver’s seat of a John Deere loader with the bucket that lifted his son resting at the roofline.
As the bright winter sun thawed the frozen ground on a February afternoon, deep mud ruts were carved into the road leading to Fifield Sugar House on Maple Hill Road in Strafford, a Vermont hamlet filled with quiet winding roads.