The wonders of the tiny pea ~ August, 1990

David Heiller

Our garden has turned into a Dairy Queen, thanks to the sweet peas. It’s a miracle, I tell you, a miracle!

Of course it all starts with planting the peas.
A perfect job for little Collin hands!

They started ripening about two weeks ago. At first we found only half a dozen at a time, small in the pod, and growing much too slow for our impatient tastes.

But is there anything more worth waiting for, sweeter, more delicious, than that first, fresh sweet pea?

We didn’t think so. Noah would joke after supper, “Let’s go have dessert, Dad,” and Mollie would think we were heading into the Dairy Queen. He would lead us to the garden and the sweet peas, and we would start picking and eating.

Mollie at first was disappointed. Sweet peas are NOT ice cream to a five-year-old. Plus she has trouble cracking open the pods. But after we handed her a few, she realized that the dessert joke wasn^’t far from the truth.

The pea patch is a haven of sorts. When I get up in the morning and stretch my legs, they seem to carry me there for a snack.

Pea shelling time.

When my brother came for a visit last week, we ended up in the pea patch, grazing like a couple of old Angus bulls.

When we sent Noah out to pick peas for a hot-dish on Sunday, he came back with one empty pod. He confessed that he had eaten them all on the way to the house.

Noah with a rare nine-pea pod.
Where is the picture with the TEN-pea pod?
I swear Noah had one of those too!

The whole family can pick them together, and shell them together. There’s no better way to visit than while doing such a simple job together.

Plus we have the quest for the elusive 10-pea pod. We found a lot with eight, and a rare nine, but a 10-pea pod is rare. Noah found one last year and I took a picture. We compare it to a .400 hitter in baseball. Another Ted Williams pea? Highly doubtful, but we keep looking.

Now WE are the ones who can’t keep up. The peas are filling mixing bowls, bigger, harder, serious about fulfilling their lot in life. Some are even bitter, and we have to throw them away. Soon they will be done altogether.

That’s all right. They had their day, and we are glad. They’ve made all that toil back in May and June worthwhile. Made it fun.

And they’ve taken the edge off the garden, the pressure that starts to loom this time of year as vegetables start to ripen all at once and the garden seems more like work than we remem­bered, and we start to wonder, bone tired, whether this is all worth it.

All that from a little pea. Now that’s a miracle.

Another side of Mrs. Spinner ~ June 29, 1995

David Heiller

Last week my mother sent me an obituary of Doris Margaret Spinner of New Albin, Iowa who died on June 8, 1995, at age 81.

She was known as Mrs. Spinner by most of the kids in Brownsville, where I grew up. She taught grades five and six there for 20 years.

Malika, Brooke (Jeanne's daughter), and Noah
playing school in one the Brownsville classrooms,
turned local history room. 

My sister, Jeanne, remembered Mrs. Spinner well. “To me she was a wonderful teacher,” Jeanne said on June 23 from her home in Klamath Falls, Oregon.

“She explained things real well. She put a lot of her own wisdom into her teaching. She had a lot of patience. You could tell she was a mother and a teacher. She would mention her own children and experiences. She had that caring side.

“We never had a substitute. In those days she was always there. I just felt she was a warm, caring person.”

“She didn’t have any favorites. She was fair. She just had all the qualities you have in a good teacher. She might have been strict, but she was positive.”

Noah and Malika are playing on the swing set outside 
of the Brownsville school house.

Jeanne said things were different when she went to school than they are today. I agree. For example, I was the only kid in my class who didn’t have a father. Everyone else had a mom and dad. There were no broken homes, no divorces, and no students with special needs. That’s not the case today. I think teaching is harder now.

Jeanne wished she had written to Mrs. Spin­ner before she died, to tell her what a good teacher she was. I think a lot of folks feel that way. Teachers need to know that they have a positive effect on people’s lives, even if they don’t always hear a thank you.

Mrs. Spinner was one of my favorite teachers too. She had a split classroom, grades five and six, with about 36 students altogether, but she was always in control.

My mom had a poem about four of the teachers at Brownsville, Mrs. Sauer, Mrs. Boettcher, Mrs. Colleran, and Mrs. Spinner. She would watch them drive past the house on their way to school. Her poem went:

Mrs. Sweet went up the street,

Mrs. Boettcher couldn’t catch her,

Mrs. Colleran stood there hollering,

But Mrs. Spinner was the winner.

She was a winner of a teacher.

I still remember one incident that showed a side of her that we hadn’t seen before. I was in sixth grade, so it must have been 1964 or 1965. I even remember where I was sitting.

This was probably taken one
of the years David was in
Mrs. Spinner's classroom.

One morning there was a knock on the door. Mrs. Spinner opened the door, and there stood a young man in a Marine uniform. He didn’t say a word. Mrs. Spinner’s face changed from anger to shock to joy in about two seconds.

Then she gave him a big hug, and a big kiss.

It was her son, Robert, who was in the Marine Corps. He was stationed in Okinawa, and was part of the blockade of the Gulf of Tonkin. Mrs. Spinner had been worried about him, and that worry transformed itself into joy before our very eyes.

I called Robert, who now lives in Topeka, Kansas, on June 23 to see if he remembered this incident. He did.

“I knocked on the door and mother turned around and looked at me like, ‘Mister, what are you doing in my classroom.’ She thought I was a policeman, I believe, bothering her school.”

He doesn’t remember the kiss, but I do. The thought of Mrs. Spinner kissing someone, even her son, had never crossed our minds. Her emo­tional greeting of Bob gave us all a new respect for her. It sent a tingle up my spine then, and it still does.

Bob, 50, told me a few more things that I didn’t know about Mrs. Spinner. She was mar­ried at age 16, so didn’t finish high school until 27 years later, after her six children were mostly grown. Then she went back to New Albin High School, and graduated in 1959, the same year as her son, James.

This was before the days of alternate schools, so she studied mostly at home and met with her teachers once a week. She didn’t want to embarrass her children.

“She knew all the teachers. She was probably older than most of the teachers anyway,” Bob said.

I told Bob I didn’t know this about his mother. “She had two lives,” he responded, her home life and her teaching life. They came together when Bob knocked on the door that day.

Mrs. Spinner is gone now. The school she taught in for 20 years has been torn down and replaced by a community center. Life goes on. But you never forget a teacher like Mrs. Spinner.

It works on deer and teenage girls ~ July 5, 2001

David Heiller

So far, so good with the Great Deer Experiment. It started last year, when some deer discovered our garden. We live in the country, and have always raised a big garden. For some reason the deer never bothered it.

Lots of garden for the enemy.

Until last summer. Then 19 years of pent-up hunger was unleashed. They ate corn, peas, beans, vine crops, and hollyhocks. They were particularly fond of the delphiniums. They would come in the middle of the night, when the dog was in the house. Many times I would step out of the house at about 6 a.m. and chase them from the garden.

It was sickening to watch the garden disappear day-by-day. I figured something had to be done for this year. Then as usual I forgot about it.

This spring, as I labored with love on the new garden, I wondered how to keep those pesky deer from repeating their new-found habits. (Pesky is not the word I normally use in describing the deer, but it works for this column.) Then about three weeks ago I saw deer hoof prints in the garden. They had found the peas and delphiniums.

So with a new sense of urgency, I called some friends, Ken and Pat Larson of Sturgeon Lake, who have a very good electric fence. Pat told me they have a wire six inches off the ground, then every six inches after that to three feet, then every foot to six feet. Now that’s a fence! All they are lacking are some German shepherds and a guard tower with a 50 millimeter machine gun.

Then I asked Rich and Bev Mensing, who have a huge garden at their home near Giese. Rich said they just plant a big garden and give half of it to the deer. Not a bad idea either.

My solution was somewhere in between: I bought a motion detector that screws into a light fixture. Into this I screwed in another fixture that has a receptacle in it. I plugged a radio into it, and screwed in a light bulb. So when the motion detector is tripped, the light comes on and the radio starts playing.

I happened to have an old radio/tape player (one of those old boom-boxes) in the garage. The volume control is broken at the maximum setting, so it is worthless for most uses, but perfect for this. To top it off, the tape deck had a tape in it of “Mollie’s Most,” filled with music that my daughter, Mollie, had made several years ago. The songs are teenage tunes by groups like Hanson and N-Sync.

The pesky ones: The enemy!

When the motion detector is tripped, a light comes, on along with 110 decibels of teenage yodeling.
Knock on wood, but it works! No deer have been in the garden since its introduction. It even scared Mollie and a friend who accidentally tripped it one evening. Mollie said it “freaked her out.” Her musical tastes have changed, thankfully.

If Hanson doesn’t scare the deer away, I will move to sound effects of barking dogs and shot gun blasts.

If that fails I will go to the ultimate weapon, the Atom Bomb of music: I will record some banjo music for the tape player. When the deer trip that, they will know they have met their match. After all, deer know that it takes two banjo players to feast on venison: one to eat and the other to watch for traffic.

A front row seat for a thunderstorm ~ July 13, 2000

David Heiller

 Noah and I each grabbed an umbrella and headed outside for an exciting Saturday night at the Heiller house.

A thunderstorm was heading our way, and we wanted to be a part of it.

Noah and David

News banners on the television screen had set the stage. Warning beeps sounded like the distress signal of a sinking submarine. Then some weather man with a real voice, a voice like yours or mine, spoke over the now-silent tennis match.

“At 7:47 p.m., a line of thunderstorms was spotted on Doppler radar moving north northeast at approximately 18 miles an hour. This storm contains hail the size of Volkswagons. In its path is the city of Finlayson and the Heiller residence.”

That’s what my imagination said at least.

There’s something about a thunderstorm that is both frightening and fascinating. You hope you don’t get zapped. You hope the wind doesn^’t turn into a tornado, or that six inches of rain doesn’t fall in two hours. You hope the hail doesn’t grow to the size of softballs. But you still want to watch it, especially the first one of the year, which this was for me.

So I unplugged the computer and VCR, and headed outside with the 17-year-old son. I was glad Noah agreed to come with me. He must have felt the same lure of the storm. There’s hope for the teenagers of the world yet!

The thunder and lightning took their time hitting us. Some thunderstorms bear down on you like a racehorse. This one ambled in like an elephant. We sat in lawn chairs first. Then as the rain picked up, we realized that mere umbrellas wouldn’t quite cut it. We moved to the pole barn, then the truck. Finally Noah suggested the greenhouse.

“Perfect,” I shouted. That’s where we settled.

The lightning flashes got brighter. It would be pitch dark, then instantly as bright as day. “I’m getting my sunglasses,” Noah shouted over the thunder. “Grab mine too,” I answered.

It must have looked pretty strange, two men standing in the dark, wearing sunglasses, at 10 at night. But that was us. We were cool.

I had brought out a box of crackers. We ate them and talked about storms we had been in before. I said I was glad we weren’t camping.

David and Noah during a different rain storm.

“Imagine being under a big white pine in the Boundary Waters.”

“You’d die for sure,” Noah answered. Thunderstorms will get you thinking like that.

Then the clouds really let go. Rain fell about as hard as rain can fall. The plastic of the greenhouse sagged under a river of rain. We touched the plastic. It seemed alive.

“It feels weird, doesn’t it?” Noah said. It did.

The rain relieved the thunder and lightning. The storm lost it’s angry will and slowly plowed to the east.

It hadn’t hit us directly. It was never that scary kind of a storm, one that bears down on you like a Mack truck and really has you worried about life and limb.

No lightning bolts had put the fear of God into us. No booms of thunder had sent us sprawling.

But Mother Nature had put on a show for us. She had earned my sense of wonder, and Noah’s too, I think.

I was lucky to see and feel that again. And having a front row seat with your son isn’t bad either.

Fishing Fever season is here ~ July 12, 2006

David Heiller

A friend of mine has been telling me about his kids and fishing lately.

“They’re crazy about it,” he said at the Redwood (café) the other noon. “All they want to do is fish.”

“So you’ve got to take them;” I said.

Malika and Noah after a fishing trip in Brownsville. 
Their daddy made sure they got 
LOTS of opportunities to fish. (1989-ish)

“Yeah;” he replied. He didn’t sound too upset about that. He had been 12 once too. Sometimes his wife will take them to a spot and leave them all day. The kids are in heaven, and their parents are too, I would wager.

Most of us adults have been there. In fact, some of us have never left. Fishing Fever. It’s like a mini-season in Minnesota, and we are in the midst of it right now.

Looking forward to a trip to the river, checking the sky for rain clouds, sloshing on the mosquito repellent. Those are the happy symptoms. Then getting to the water. Soaking in the quiet. Finding that favorite spot and it’s empty as usual, because you are the sole owner of that little square of earth and water.

My brother Danny and I had a spot like that for a year in the Reno Bottoms. It took quite a ritual to go there, which made it even more special. We usually did chores or played around Brownsville during the day that Fishing Fever Summer of 1966.

Then around 5 p.m. or so our thoughts would turn to that spot in Reno. We would make sure we had a few worms or night-crawlers. That wasn’t always easy to do, especially during dry spells when the ground was like concrete. Supper was always at 5:30, but we’d gobble it down and Danny would drive the Chevy to Reno. He had his license by then.

We always took Grandma’s kerosene lantern with us. The bullheads wouldn’t start to bite until it started getting dark, and we needed that flickering light to find our way out.

The path to the hot spot went through the bottomland below the spillway on the west side. There was a main path, then another path to the right, then another path to the left. That was our spur. It was hard to see. It took us to a little clearing on Running Slough.

It wasn’t an easy walk, and that was part of the fun, in a perverse way. You had to walk with your arms raised high, because every plant that grows in the bottoms is itch weed or poison ivy.

The bullheads at that spot were legendary. You don’t see a lot of bullheads these days. I’m not sure why. And a lot of people don’t get excited about them. But they were king to us back then. We thought they tasted good, and they put up a good fight, both on the line and in your hand. One or two would always inflict a puncture wound on us as we took out the hooks and put them on the stringer.

I still remember the biggest one we caught, 13-3/4 inches. It doesn’t sound that big, but for a bullhead it is. Danny caught it. I caught several that were 13-5/8 inches, but after careful measurement we both confirmed that they didn’t reach Danny’s record. He still reminds me of that.

Fishing Fever and kids. (1987-ish)

The walk back out of the bottoms was always a little scary. Like I said, the kerosene lantern didn’t throw a lot of light, and we had to keep our arms high, and carry the rods and tackle box and stringer of fish, which was like carrying a stringer of knives because of the bullhead spikes. And don’t forget the mosquitoes. The “Off” would wear off about that time, and the skeeters would roar down on us like fighter jets. The entire bottoms would be filled with their drones.

It was tricky following the right paths back to the spillway too. “Do we go right here?” You don’t want to get turned around in the bottoms. Occasionally we would forget to fill the lantern with kerosene. Then it would go black on the walk out, and we’d have to slow down, talking back and forth so we didn’t get separated. We would look up and try to find the opening in the trees above that would signal the pathway. It was always a relief to leave the bottoms and come out onto the spillway and see the big wide river.

When we’d get home with the fish, Mom and Grandma would make a fuss. Then it was into the basement, lay a board on top of the wash tubs, skin the bullheads, scale the pan fish. Not a fun job, but somehow fulfilling.

That hot spot disappeared for us late that summer when we arrived only to find an entire family of Bunges from Eitzen firmly fishing there. All good things come to an end. That’s another little fishing lesson. You move on, find a new spot. Grow up, get married, have kids, go fishing with them. It’s a great life cycle!

It’s fun to hear my friend talk about his kids and their fishing adventures. Some things will never change, and that makes me glad.