Photo of the 1949 cleaning up party at our neighbour's sugar bush on Mont Saint Paul in Quebec at the end of the season. My mother, eight months pregnant with my brother Luc, is sitting on my father's lap. René Morrisette, the owner, is to the left of my father.

On my latest visit to Noggins Market in Greenwich, they had sugar maple spiles for sale — the traditional metal tubes inserted in sugar maples, with a lip for the maple sap to drip from and a hole to hook the metal pail that would catch the sap —that brought me back to my childhood when my family would help out our neighbours at their sugar shack during the short weeks that the sap would run.

René Morissette and his wife Cora would welcome small parties of people who would come to celebrate the end of winter and the early days of spring. They would get a huge lunch of beans (grown and dried by the owners) cooked in molasses and salted pork belly, crusty bread, eggs poached in maple syrup (I’m not kidding!), fried pork rind, home made pickles and sugar pies.

People would wander on the trails, drink a lot of rye mixed with steaming sugar sap being boiled down to syrup in the evaporators, have sing-a-longs, and before they left, would enjoy sugar taffy poured over snow.

All of us kids would roam the mountain side, getting wet from sliding and falling into streams, and then going inside the cabin to get dry sitting in front of one of the three wood stoves. The owners’ relatives and neighbours, and their kids, would come over and help out some, and enjoy this special time of year.

The sap was collected by means of buckets hooked onto wooden yokes, then poured into the “tonne”, a large metal container nailed to a wooden sled. The horse, Pit, knew all the trails by heart, and knew where to stop for the men to empty their pails. No driver required. By the end of the run, he would be covered in lather.

By the time us girls turned nine or so, we’d be press ganged into doing the wash up after lunch. That meant using water heated by the wood stove boiler, and spending hours, it seemed, doing dishes. Then we’d be free to go back to playing outside. By the time we’d eaten our share of maple taffy, we were tired and drowsy, sitting on the benches with bare feet, waiting for our socks to dry by the stoves, staring at Currier and Ives calendars, the cabin lit by kerosene lamps.

Until we went down the hillside back to the cars, you could still believe that it was 1907 rather than 1957.

One of my clearest recollections is of a sunny and warm day in April, when mon oncle René had finished straightening things out at the sugar shack for the year. My brother was eight, and I was five. René put a feed cloth on Pit’s back to serve as a saddle, scooped us up on him, gave the old guy a push in the direction of home, and we rode back to his stable in Emileville, about two kilometers away. I felt so grown up!

These are cherished memories, and although I miss smelling the maple-scented steam coming from the evaporators, and drinking ice-cold sap from the pail, I’m afraid that if I went to a snow bush today, I wouldn’t feel the magic that I remember.

But, if you want to, there’s a number of sugar bush places in the province to enjoy what is still a beautiful tradition.