Spring: a time of ‘treasures’ and mud ~ March 17, 1994

By David Heiller

You have to have a lot of patience this time of year. Spring takes its merry time in arriving. The calling cards that winter leaves aren’t the kind you can put in your shirt pocket. They are emerging from the snow now.

A green mitten off a snowman. A puddle full of dead minnows from an unsuccessful ice fishing trip. A bolt from the tractor (maybe that’s why the tractor quit running). A jack-o-lantern that now looks like it could use a whole lot of Preparation H.

Pop cans. A dead rabbit carcass. A bucket of compost that didn’t quite make it to the pile. A winter’s worth of ashes dumped behind the outhouse.

And don’t forget the dog, who leaves the worst calling card of all.

Noah, mud, and spring.

A skidder accidently ran over a flower bed a month ago, the one surrounded with my rock collection. Now the yard looks like a glacial deposit of rocks and wood.

There’s an occasional treasure though. Last week I found a rusty padlock by the garage. It had been missing for several years. Now it had cropped out of the ground like a rock in a field.

My son took a shine to it, and a file too. He likes padlocks. They somehow go with guns and hunting, his latest 10-year-old obsessions.

If you can’t shoot it, at least lock it up. Noah has a future with the Department of Corrections.

So he oiled and filed the lock for an hour, until it was shiny and worked like new. I found an orange Sebald Motors key chain from the junk drawer, and put the key on it. That suited Noah fine, because he likes Ford trucks, especially four wheel drive ones.

Then he put the lock on the trunk in his bedroom that holds his 67 hunting magazines. It already had one padlock on it, but you can never have enough padlocks when you are a kid. They’re like jack knives that way.

Then there’s the mud. I visited Ron and Nicol Zuk on March 12 for an ad and article for our ag edition. When it came time for a photo, Ron had to go change his coat. It was covered with mud (and maybe a little manure).

I said: “You wouldn’t look like a farmer if you weren’t covered with mud.” He agreed, but changed into a clean shirt anyway.

Then he brought out a huge tractor to use as a prop in the photo. It was covered with mud. He apologized for that too.

More mud... Digging Malika out.

When was the last time you saw a vehicle that wasn’t covered with mud in Pine County in March? Maybe if you launder money for a living, you can keep your car clean too. But I don’t trust a person with a clean car who lives in the country. A clean tractor would be even worse.

With mud comes boots. I broke out my pair of size 12 brown ones on Sunday. They’re the kind you probably wore to school if you were a kid 30 years ago. They have four buckles that you can fasten loosely or tightly.

Mom always buckled them tight, then I would loosen them when I got to school. They weren’t cool, like the ones with zippers, but they worked, and they still do.

I put my tennis shoes on, then put these on, and walked around like Frankenstein. My wife laughed out loud when she saw me wearing them on Sunday.

Spring is a good time to laugh. You’ve got to have humor, and patience, as spring slowly saunters our way.