When I was a kid growing up in Northwest Ohio in the 1960’s, I remember tapping a couple maple trees (who cared if they were Silver Maples?) with my Grandpa Line in the front yard of the home on Washington Avenue in Findlay where he and Grandma lived, and where my dad and his sister grew up.

We grandkids hung a few buckets, and tasted the sap, and helped boil it down in a big kettle down cellar on the old electric range where Grandma canned so many quarts of vegetables, applesauce and jars of jelly, the steam filling the basement with the sweet smell of maple. Grandpa had grown up on the family farm just south of town that was homesteaded by our ancestors in 1840, and sugar maples were tapped down by Eagle Creek every spring, the sap collected from the wooden buckets with a team of horses.

The syrup was boiled down in a sugarhouse that no longer exists, the fire fueled by natural gas, as there was a well on the farm that provided free heat in the winter and avoided the need to cut wood to make syrup. The last year syrup was made on the Line Homestead in Arlington was 1957, when I was not quite 2 years old.

Every Christmas, my Grandma Boice, my mother’s mother, would give a quart of real Vermont maple syrup to my dad, and that quart would last almost a year, as none of us 3 kids were allowed to touch it unless Dad said we could. He would occasionally make sourdough pancakes on a Saturday morning, and would now and then make a freezer of homemade ice cream, and I remember well the amazing taste of real maple syrup on those treats. Of course, like most families of that era, and perhaps too many households today, our usual syrup was that which today I just cannot stand: Aunt Jemima’s, Log Cabin, or Mrs. Butterworth’s.