It’s maple syrup time: not quite spring, but close enough to taste it, along with that sweet seasonal nectar.

In Maine, we seem to measure the changing seasons in different ways. Mud season is approaching, followed by black fly season, pick-your-own strawberries season, and so forth.

Once in awhile, I write about the everyday things that happened some 50 years ago on our Androscoggin Valley farm. Sugaring time was one such event, and many homes in the area had some maple trees to tap each year. That usually meant pans of sap on a wood-fired kitchen stove and sweet-smelling steam swirling throughout the room.

My memories of that time are vivid, but they are all the more significant to me lately because I have been reading a new book that makes me feel I might have lived it in some parallel universe.

Well, maybe a rather close parallel universe. Those shared memories are in a wonderful little memoir of youth on an Auburn farm. It’s titled “Growing up on Maple Hill Farm,” by Jerry Stelmok.

I’ll let a few examples from his book tell you how Stelmok and I – separately but with almost the same view – saw rural Auburn as boys in the mid-1900s.

Maple Hill, which is also called Dillingham Hill, looks down on Lake Auburn from the north side of Lake Shore Drive. Maple Hill Farm originated when Isaac Dillingham built a cape-style house in 1797. He was the son of John Dillingham, who put up the first log cabin on the hill in 1783.

Stelmok’s grandfather was born in Lithuania in 1888. It was the same year that a farmer named Osgood completed a large post-and-beam barn on Maple Hill. In 1909, Vincent Josef Stelmok fled the armies of the Russian czar and eventually reached Lewiston, where he had relatives. He married and worked in the city’s textile mills before buying the farm on the hill in 1925.

Although that early history was very different from my ancestors’, the experiences converged remarkably as our families operated their farms in Auburn. Stelmok’s maple sugar memories hit an especially harmonious chord with me.

He recalled “sap bubbling slowly on the stovetop pans.” The result of a kitchen operation was only a few quarts of what he called “commercially imperfect syrup,” but Stelmok said it is “the best medicine I know to cleanse the bitter taste of winter from one’s (palate) and spirit.”

Modern maple-sugaring is demonstrated at several nearby locations at this time of year. For those with historic curiosity, Maple Sugar Days at the Washburn-Norlands Living History Center in Livermore (phone 897-4366) is scheduled for March 22 and 23. It’s a great opportunity to see how sugaring and so many other things were done on area farms a hundred years ago.

Harvesting ice

In addition to his memories of maple sugar season, Stelmok also has some interesting descriptions of cutting ice on Lake Auburn.

“Once any snow cover was pushed off a patch, a checkerboard pattern was scored deeply into the surface by a horse-drawn scriber,” he wrote. “An initial block was sacrificed by laboriously chiseling it away.”

Then a long, coarse-toothed saw cut off a row, and blocks up to 150 pounds each could be cleaved off along the scored lines. Workers used ice tongs and a long-handled pick-like tool called an ice hook.

The floating blocks were maneuvered to ramps and slid to “scoots,” or the beds of trucks for transport to commercial or farmers’ ice houses.

There, the blocks were covered with sawdust. Stelmok also wrote about “coping with cows,” hunting and trapping, Lou Libby’s general store at North Auburn and fishing from the nearby bridge, swinging on ropes in the barn, and chimney fires.

Family photos and several color pages of Stelmok’s original watercolors of farm life are also included in his book.

“Growing up on Maple Hill Farm” was published just a few months ago and can be found at local bookstores.

Though I never met Stelmok, I was pleased to discover so many similar memories. I’m reminded that what I may write, or what Jerry Stelmok writes, is not necessarily new to our readers. Often, we’re just stirring the embers of all those experiences that we thought were ours alone.

Dave Sargent is a freelance writer and an Auburn native. You can e-mail him at [email protected].