Editor’s Note: Katherine Heidinger’s column will be moving to Thursdays, beginning April 21.

April showers bring flowers that bloom in May, so the song – and cliche – goes. What rain has brought – and wrought – around the Down East area are cascading streams, road washouts, culvert backups, flooding and a mud season severe enough to lose a body as if in quicksand.

Or, at least, lose a hip boot as though in a honey pot of sucking mud at low tide.

This whole scenario has taken me back to John Gould’s reminiscences of olden days along coastal Maine when folks had more sense, it seemed. Around this time of year, when one was taking out the dogs – or the wash – in the early morning after another all-night drizzle, downpour or merely steady rain, he or she (or both) wore “mud pattens” to facilitate walking on mud, as on a clam flat. The slats or small boards were fastened to the feet in the manner of snowshoes, according to Gould, who knew Maine’s seasonal menu from soup to nuts, as they say.

Another thing he knew and aptly described was mud season itself, Maine’s “fifth season (the others are Fall, Winter, Spring, and July).”

But I disagree somewhat with John Gould when he said that “since paved roads, the term [mud season] has lost some of its pithiness. When the frost was leaving the ground, teaming was suspended, the dooryard was a lully and Mother made everybody take off boots on the doorstep.”

Or she made them scrape off their boots on the flatform, or platform, or whatever was called the boarded area, or walkway, at the back door where mud and snow were stamped off boots.

We all get the picture: Smart, no-nonsense Mainers had some appendage to their residence – a boarded area usually at the back door but not necessarily connected to the house or foundation – where residents or visitors alike could shed their residue: summer, garden manure; fall, oily bait scales; winter, snow; and spring, muck and mud the likes of which could very well flatten the “flatform.”

To further dispute the venerable Gould, the term “mud season” actually has gained in “pithiness,” we think, as well as in other colorful adjectives since paved roads, because it is in that irony Mainers now drive between gullies that could crash their trucks or submerge their kids’ bicycles, or go axle deep in a pothole-turned-crevice-turned-abyss.

I’m not sure what term adequately describes John Gould’s “mud season” today: when the team isn’t suspended but mired down; when folks don’t even know what a lully is. Perhaps a new term by another legendary Maine writer, Stephen King, could better fit the bill. He’d find some horrific tale to spin around a season in which madness could be written in mud as a name in sand.

Doubt it would be “pithy.”