Winters aren’t like they used to be. Any old-timer will tell you that.

About 50 years ago, the snow would drift half-way up the windows on the west side of the farmhouse. Sometimes we waited and watched for two days for the plows to break our road open.

I remember those winters very well. At least, I think I do, but nothing magnifies memories about the severity of weather like the passage of time.

Stories about the old-time winters fascinate me, and I learned a little more about those times in an article written by a Turner teacher in 1922. Sarah Hopkins wrote in the Lewiston Journal about the winter of 1872 when she taught at the North Parish School. She recalled a visit to a student’s home in the northern part of town.

“I remember the drifts eight feet deep through which we rode, perhaps three feet over our heads, on the way back to school,” she said. When she talked about those days, her opinions were not so different from what you hear today.

She wrote, “Sixty years ago no one ever came to take the children to school every day and to transport them in autos and teams to their homes.”

In the mid-1800s, farmers took great pride in their matched yokes of oxen. Sarah Hopkins described how they used the teams to break open the roads, “calling it fun to shovel through the great drifts of snow for which Turner is famous.”

She continued, “Today, the boys esteem it a hard job and wait for the winds to stop blowing before hitching the work horses to the roller to break the roads.”

This teacher had an admiring recollection of one Turner resident – probably one of her students.

“I have seen Win Allen of Chase’s Mills sit down in the road in the snow, take his boots off, and rub his feet, they were so cold, to keep them from freezing, put on his boots, say nothing and pursue his onward way,” she wrote.

Whether they are tales of long ago or as recent as the great Ice Storm of 1998, every family in a northern latitude will have remarkable winter stories to tell.

My father published a small book of poems and prose in 1983 called “Homespun.” In it, he recalls a January thaw in 1928 when my grandfather hitched Old Polly – “the meanest mare that ever lived” – to a sleigh and headed to town for a load of grain. Old Polly was tough to manage and had a tendency to bite.

“One day, Pa stooped. She grabbed him by the belt. He carried teeth marks on his back to his grave,” my father wrote.

Nevertheless, Dad says my grandfather forgave everything after that winter day when he claimed Old Polly saved his life.

“The weather turned to a snarlin’ blizzard – blotted everything,” my father wrote. The sleigh sank and stuck in the rain-softened snow on the road and my grandfather fumbled in the swirling snow to unhook the trace chains.

“Pa gave the mare her head and hung to a britchin’ strap,” the story said. His wet clothes froze, as well as his eyes and hair. Polly’s, too, crusted over. “When I opened the big barn door, I scarcely knew the pair,” my father wrote.

No matter how much we yearn for an early spring or the warmth of a summer day, there’s nothing like winter for once-in-a-lifetime memories.

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