Freelensing is a passion of mine. This year I've decided to devote more time to my personal work. This is a group of women from all over the world that support, motivate, and inspire each other in our love of taken our lenses off. Once a month we post our freelensed images and link them together. Next stop over to my friend Leslie Schoen to check out her gorgeous work.

We live in the "city" with city trees. Actually our area is naturally covered in White Pine and Oak. But, we moved on a lot with Maples, and we planted more. Every March we tap our city tress to make some amazing Maple syrup. This year we upped our game. My husband had a local high school shop class work on a new burner, and the boys helped collect all the fire wood. Thankfully we live across the street from some beautiful woods with lots of dead wood.

We ended up boiling four weekends this year. The run was so good we could hardly keep up. It was a good thing we had a more efficient method. Kids ran round playing outside while the neighborhood would stop by to see how things were going. Complete strangers on their evening walks would spend moments to talk with us about the venture.

We'd start around 8:30 in the morning. Eat lunch and dinner over the fire. Get the kiddos to bed then spend the evening conversing in the dark with the sweet smokey smells, and the roar of a hot stove.

Jars were then boiled and the sweet syrup was canned. Mornings were spent sleeping in from late nights, baking scones with Maple syrup as a sugar substitute, and handing out jars to friends and families. The run should last into April but we are done. We have enough sweetness to last us the year.