Where is fall going? ~ September 30, 1999

David Heiller

Cindy called me at 4:30 last Wednesday afternoon, September 22. “Let’s go for a walk at Banning,” she said.

It had been a busy day at work for us, and a busy night was planned, with one of us to pick up our son from football practice and the other to attend a confirmation meeting with our daughter.

But we needed that walk at Banning State Park. We only had an hour to spare. How could we not afford to spare it on a fall walk?

A walk in the woods is ALWAYS a good plan.

“Sounds great,” I told Cindy, and in half an hour we were there, Cindy and Mollie and me, on the familiar trail heading toward the Kettle River.

The air had that fall hue to it, of sunlight filtered through red and orange and yellow. A couple of hard frosts had knocked back the bugs. A few leaves lay on the trail, but not so thick that we kicked them up. The trees hadn’t dropped a lot of leaves. That’s happening right now.

We walked hand in hand in hand, three abreast, on the wide trail. Mollie jabbered about school and friends and TV shows. Cindy duti­fully answered. I mostly kept quiet, enjoying the silence of the woods that lay just beyond our words.

Eventually Mollie’s talking dwindled. We settled into hiking conversation. People talk differently on a walk. Words don’t fall so fast or so loud. Periods of silence don’t feel awkward.

We came to the river and watched the water flow swiftly past. “This is the same water that goes under the Kettle River bridge by our house,” I said, trying to impress the ladies. They nodded politely.

We walked past a big kettle, which is a hole in the rocks worn by water and stones. “My Headstart kids used to play in that kettle,” Cindy said.

A walk in the woods.

Banning Park is full of memories like that, of walks and picnics with people come and gone.

We walked almost to Hell’s Gate. The trail rose and fell sharply. Mollie went ahead of us, a sure-footed teenager. I offered a hand to Cindy, and she took it gratefully.

I checked my watch. Time to turn around. All three of us had appointments to keep.

We met two other parties on the trail back, a man and woman, and a group of women. We all said hello. Their smiles said that they were enjoying the later afternoon walk as much as we were.

When we got to the parking lot, Mollie headed to the car to sit and listen to her favorite radio station. Cindy and I had 10 more min­utes, so we walked on a bit, just the two of us, like the old days. It was very nice.

Our walk in the park ended too soon. But we were lucky to have done it. It hadn’t been planned. That made it even more fun.

Fall is a good time to be in the woods, to be outside period, hunting, fishing, working in the garden. The sad part is that it goes by so fast. Where is this fall going? October starts on Friday!

I wish time could stand still. It doesn’t, so we have to take advantage of those little cracks in our day when we can escape to Banning or Mud Lake or the road outside our house.

I’m sure a walk in the woods will feel differently this week. Colors are at their peak. Leaves are raining down. Guess I’ll have to find out.

A good bee season ~ September 28, 2000

David Heiller

Bees are a small part of my life, but one that I like. They only sting when they are mad. They are like people in that way.

I have one hive of bees. That isn’t much, even though a hive can contain 80,000 bees. A few of them stung me on Sunday when I took half of their honey away. I couldn’t blame them.

I was late in taking the honey, as Nick Worobel pointed out on September 21. He was a master beekeeper in his day, first in Ukraine then in rural Bruno. Now he lives in the big city of Sandstone. When I told him I was going to take the honey on Sunday, a wistful look flickered across his face and he smiled.

“Make sure you feed the bees when you are done,” he said, after reminding me that I was about a month late in my job. “Mix half sugar and half water and set it on top of hive. They like that.”

Good old Nick will be giving bee advice on his deathbed, which hopefully will be many years away.

One of David's beekeeping chores. This is a 
spring job getting the hive ready for the bees.

I knew I was late in my job. Other things had taken priority. “Life got in the way,” as they say. So I was happy that Sunday was warm and sunny and I could put on the bee suit and take the honey.

I smoked the hive first, using a smoker that was filled with smoldering twine. Smoke confuses the bees and sends them retreating into the hive, according to the bee book. Of course, the bees have never read the book. Rather than retreat, some of them seemed to charge.

But I had my bee suit on, so their angry buzzing didn’t bother me. I’d be angry too if someone was stealing my summer wages.

I pulled off the cover and lifted out a frame, using a frame grabbing tool. I brushed bees off the frame using a soft brush. Bee keepers have a lot of special tools. I set the frame in a box in a cart, and did the same to another frame, and another, until I had taken two boxes of frames, about 18 in all. The bees had filled four boxes of frames. I left another 18 frames for the bees to eat over the winter. Sorry bees, but that’s what the book says.

Full beekeeping regalia.

I pushed the cart to the sauna, which doubles as my bee processing room. I put the frames in there. A fire crackled in the stove. In a short while the frames were warm. That made the honey softer and easier to extract.

I took two frames and cut the wax off, using a heated knife (another special honey tool). The wax, which was full of honey too, went into a metal bowl. Then I set the frames in an extractor, which looks like a huge tin can with a handle. I turned the handle as fast as I could for about half a minute, which spun the frames inside. Then I opened the extractor, reversed the frames, and did it again. Centrifugal force extracted the honey from the combs and into the can.

I repeated this step until about half the frames had been extracted. Then I put an ice cream bucket under the spigot at the bottom of the extractor and watched honey pour out. There’s nothing as pretty as watching that first batch of honey ooze out of the spigot. It looked like golden crude oil.

The sauna had a lot of bees in it by then, and more were arriving by the minute. Word had spread that their honey supply had moved to the sauna. I didn’t have my bee suit on anymore, and bees were crawling on my arms and face and hair. One was inching up the inside of my pants leg. That one was a bit distracting. But the rest didn’t bother me. A few stung, but that’s nothing to an old garlic eater like me. Most of them were too busy trying to gather up their honey and take it back to the hive. They were done being angry, and had returned to work.

I de-capped and extracted the rest of the frames. I carried the pans and extractor to the hive. There was still some honey on it. The bees will find it and clean it up. Then I’ll wash it and put it away. I’ll follow Nick’s advice and feed the bees some sugar water, and hope they make it through the winter.

I ended up with four buckets of honey, plus another two buckets of cappings. That’s good for me. All of this will be strained through cheese-cloth and put in jars. I’ll give some away, some I will barter, but most of it will go on peanut butter sandwiches and into cups of tea. It should last for a year. Then this fun fall job will be repeated.

Fall arrived in glorious fashion ~ September 20, 2006

David Heiller

We weren’t the only ones with an idea for a Saturday evening walk on the spillway.

There were the fishermen who met us on the way to their cars. Three different groups, and they all had a contented look that said the fishing was good. The first guy said the bass were biting. Another man gave me a rundown on a big carp—it must have been 10 pounds, he said with a laugh. The third guy mumbled that he caught a few, which translates in fishing language to fantastic fishing, although I’ve yet to hear the latter statement, ever.

Bob and Gail with me and two of
the dogs on a fall spillway walk.
 The river is a good place to go and reconnect yourself.

Then there was that family fishing by the spillway, the kids all lined up oldest to youngest, and the little guy’s pole bending with a bluegill. That was almost too pretty for words. A father and son pedaled past us on their way to the unspoiled waters of the second spillway. You could almost feel their energy and excitement. What better thing to be doing on a Saturday night?

They were all there like us, soaking up the last of the summer.

   You could feel this evening coming all week, and you didn’t need the weatherman to announce it. There was a change in the air for days. We’ve come to sense that after so many years and generations in Minnesota. Things were going to change soon. The hot days, forget it. They are history. It’s time for cool nights, brisk mornings, a good stiff wind, gray clouds that hint of November. Even the dreaded word “frost” is starting to enter the fringe of our thoughts.

The drive down the the spillway is always lovely,
but the autumn is special.

That’s what made the walk so special. The golden sun still had some summer warmth. A heron coasted over the water. Three little water snakes hurried across the gravel. A group of five pelicans floated and turned in perfect unison.

Our friends helped too. We had brought them to the spillway to show them one of our favorite spots. It’s always fun to do that, and even more fun when it is appreciated in rich return, which it was. At one point Gail stopped and looked to the north, the broad river stretching to Brownsville and beyond. She seemed to be breathing it all in. Gail grew up in St. Louis. She said she missed the river. I could tell she needed it, like many of us do, and this little walk was quenching that, a little at least. Every little bit helps when it comes to connecting to something that is flowing in your veins.

A lovely autumn sky looking across the road.

And that leads to fishing. So cut to Sunday morning. I biked to my favorite spot and tested the water, and sure enough, those fishermen were smiling for a reason. A fish on almost every cast. Sunnies, perch, catfish, bass, even Cindy’s favorite, a sheepshead. I pulled them in steadily, keeping some, tossing some back. My two dogs sat patiently nearby. No one else in sight. It was pretty much my definition of heaven.

The weather changed during those couple hours, like I knew it would. The wind picked up from the west and herded in thick gray clouds. They soon joined together and blotted out the sun. The temperature dropped. A few raindrops fell. It suddenly felt like fall.

I headed back with my load of fish, dogs trotting alongside. A sense of thankfulness settled on me. For this place of unequaled beauty, for friends and fish and changing seasons.

We’ll get our share of Indian summer yet, and some glorious autumn days too. But fall is here, and it couldn^’t have arrived in any better way than it did last weekend.

The tale of the garage/shop/clubhouse ~ September 12, 1996

David Heiller

It had to end this way, I thought as I drove into the yard last Friday night. My daughter and her two friends stood in the yard, holding sleeping bags and heading toward the garage.

The “garage” never, ever held a vehicle. It
 wasn’t useful that way, it was an old shed that 
someone decades earlier had built to house a car, 

but they really didn’t know what they were doing.

Or is it the shop? The building is going through an identity crisis.

This story started about six months ago with a home improvement project.

First we had our kitchen redone, complete with new cupboards. The old cupboards would work great in the garage, I thought. We’ve never had a car in the garage anyway. I could make a shop out of the garage.

Pulling cupboards out of the kitchen to make way 
for new ones meant that David would be able to 
use them to organize a shop!
Or did it?

A shop. Two words that can make a middle-aged man happy for life.

Maybe a shop like Frank Magdziarz’s, which is clean and orderly. Maybe a shop like Red Hansen’s, where every square inch is filled with tools and gadgets.

But like all projects, this one had a “first things first” clause. First I had to repair the sills of the garage, which were rotten.

I thought that would be an easy job. Bruce Lourey of Moose Lake made it sound like it would be a breeze. It probably would be for him, being a carpenter and all. It wasn’t for me.

Two weeks later I put in the cupboards. Then I moved things from my old work space in the upstairs of the garage to the new work space downstairs. It’s funny, but the new cupboards and counters and walls instantly became a clut­tered mess just like the old space.

As long as I was reorganizing things, I thought I might as well clean out the rest of the upstairs of the garage.

This was no small job. I had thrown a lot of junk up there.

Everything that had outgrown its usefulness in the house had been put in the upstairs of the garage. Fifteen years worth.

Old kitchen dishes. Clothes the kids had out-grown. Clothes their father had outgrown. Three pair of rubber boots with holes in the left foot. (Why did only the left-footed boots have holes? What are the odds of that?)

You have to be firm when you clean a garage. I used the “Test of Time.” I kept asking myself, “Have I used this in the past two years?” If the answer was no, then out it went.

Some of the stuff was trash. It became part of a truckload of junk that I dumped at the Carlton County transfer station for $27.17.

Some of the stuff was too good to throw away. So I called Wilma Krogstad of Askov and asked if the Bruno Thrift Store could use it. She said yes. A load of used clothes and toys and kitchen utensils and books and you-name-it went to Bruno.

Except for a few things. Actually quite a few. I couldn’t throw away the old high chair that I had used when I was a baby, and that our two kids had used. A lot of sentimental value there.

Two old hats, they’d make part of a great cos­tume. My old down jacket. The wheel weights to the walk-behind tractor, I couldn’t throw them out, even though I had never used them. An old grind stone. And so on.

Still, the top of the garage got cleaned out pretty well. I even swept off the threadbare carpet on the floor. It gave me a good feeling, seeing a space so cluttered that you couldn’t even walk through it become open and clean again.

And then my daughter found it.

The daughter with designs on Daddy's space.

I knew she would. She always does. She sen­sed it the way a thirsty horse senses water, and she stampeded for it with her two friends, sleep­ing bags in hand, and I caught them in the glare of my head lights where they stood shaking in fear and excitement.

They had been going to sleep in Mollie’s “other” clubhouse, but it has woodchips for a floor, and no door, and Mollie remembered that I had been cleaning the garage, even though I hadn’t said anything to her, and they found it and it was so nice and they even swept the carpet and washed some of the shelves and couldn’t they sleep there, pleeeese? I knew it would end this way.

I said yes. Show me the dad that would have said no.

Later I looked in on them. They were snug­gled in their bags, laughing and talking, and the upstairs looked like it was made just for them, and I wished for a minute that I was 11 again.

I guess no garage or shop would be complete without a clubhouse upstairs.

Not the greatest way to lose weight ~ September 21, 2000

David Heiller

I like to swallow a clove of garlic every morning. It’s supposed to be good for your heart. It’s supposed to help you lose weight.

I swallowed a clove last Thursday at 6 a.m. I knew I was in trouble as soon as I swallowed it. It hung in the back of my throat, then slipped down my gullet like a boat anchor.

Somewhere part way down—not all the way down—it stopped.

When it came time for breakfast, I couldn’t eat. I tried one bite of bread, and it also went part way down and stopped. I took a drink of water. It went part way down, and stopped.

No problem, I thought. The garlic will work its way south, and I’ll soon be able to eat and drink.

But that didn’t happen. Not at 10 a.m. Not at noon. Not at 2 p.m. That garlic clove was lodged in my throat.

It didn’t hurt. It didn’t bother my voice or my breathing. But I couldn’t eat or drink, and this was not the way I like to lose weight.

At about 2:30 I called Gateway Clinic in Sandstone. I was hoping my doctor might have a quick fix, like Syrup of Ipecac or cod liver oil. Even a good old Heimlich Maneuver.

But his nurse told me what I was dreading. Go to the emergency room in Moose Lake. Come on, for a clove of garlic?

Yυp.

It wasn’t pretty. First the emergency room nurse tried the “easy” approach. She put a tube down my nose and into my throat, and made me drink water at the same time.

The goal was to flush it out. It had worked for someone who had lettuce stuck in her throat, the nurse said. But it didn’t work for me. When my gagging subsided and my nose quit running and I could breathe again, I took a drink of water, and felt the water back up like it does in a clogged drain.

“How big was that clove of garlic?” she asked.

It didn’t seem that big, but by this time Ι wasn’t sure about anything. The size of a tennis ball?

Plan Β wasn’t quite as “easy.” I needed a surgeon. Yes, for a clove of garlic. Dr. Peter Billings explained that he would put a “scope” down my throat. A scope in this case is a tube that has a light and a camera and a pair of pliers at the end. That’s what Dr. Billings told me. I didn’t look at it. I didn’t want to see what I would have to swallow.

The goal was to see what was happening in my throat, and remove the garlic, by force if necessary.

By this time my wife, Cindy, had joined me. She got to watch it all on a monitor. She said it was fascinating. She got a good view of my throat and, eventually, a beautiful clove of garlic lying in my stomach. It was really a nice one, she said. It could have won a blue ribbon at the Askov Fair.

I didn’t see it. Ι was in no mood to watch television.

When I finally stood up at 7 p.m. and took a drink of water, it went down like Niagara Falls. What a great feeling!

Thanks, all you doctors and nurses. Not only did you dislodge The Garlic Clove That Ate Manhattan, you managed to keep a straight face while doing it. That’s good bedside manner.

I’m embarrassed by my mistake. But I learned a painful lesson. I’m sharing it here with the hope that anyone else dumb enough to swallow a clove of garlic—or whatever—will size it up first and use better judgment than me.

Holy cow, it’s Holy Matrimony time ~ November 24, 1988

David Heiller

I started thinking about marriage at an early age. Our seventh grade class was putting on a Thanksgiving play, The Courtship of Miles Standish, at school. I had the role of the minister. Toward the end of the play, the pilgrims made a circle and gave thanks for their blessings. I led the prayer. “Let us bow our heads in Holy Matrimony,” I began.

Ann Conrad, standing next to me, started giggling. She thought that was the greatest joke. I didn’t even know what I had said. It had sounded official, something a pilgrim would say. But he wouldn’t have said it to Ann Conrad.

Now, some 22 years later, the subject of Holy Matrimony has been raised again, and once again, I’m the culprit. It all started as a joke. Mollie was talking about her best friend at the day care. “I really like Bobbi Jo,” she said.

Grandma O watches as a very small Malika puts
the pieces of the puzzle in place.

“She’s a pretty good egg,” I answered in one of my standard lines.

“She’s not an egg, she’s a goy-yo,” Mollie said. “A goy-yo?”I answered.

“Not a goy-yo, a GOY-YO!” Mollie insisted. “Oh, a girl,” I said.

“Yes, a goy-yo,” she repeated.

“So she’s a pretty good friend. Are you going to marry her?” I said it as a joke, but Mollie thought the idea made sense. So much sense that she expanded to Tommy, Bobby Jo’s brother.

“I’m going to marry Tommy,” she announced at the breakfast table on October 13. Noah, Mollie’s older brother, asked why.

“Because I want to,” she answered. Then she paused. “I don’t want to marry Tommy. I want to marry Brooks. Is Brooks a boy?”

Noah answered yes. “But you can’t right now,” he said. “You have to wait till you’re grown up.”

“I want to marry Bobbi,” Mollie said in another change of mind. “Daddy, can I marry Bobbi?”

“No, you can’t marry Bobbi,” I replied.

“Why?” she asked.

“Because she’s a girl,” I said.

“Why can’t I marry a goy-yo?”

“Because it’s against the law,” I said in desperation.

Malika the ballerina princess, and would-be bride.

Laws or no laws, Mollie now goes through new partners several times a day. There’s Brooks, Bobbi Jo, Tommy, Noah (yes, her brother), Tristan, Mathew, and Queen Ida (our dog), among others.

At her rate, she’ll make Liz Taylor look like Mother Theresa.

She has learned an important exception though. “I really like you, Dad,” she said the other day. “But I’m not going to marry you.” That’s a relief.

All this talk had over-flowed to my wife and I. We probably should save our breath, but now we disagree on the proper age for our daughter to get married. Cindy feels she should be at least 30.

“Thirty? Holy mackerel, that’s old,” I protested, failing to remember my own age before I spoke. “Besides, you were 24 when you married me.”

Cindy didn’t answer that, letting me draw my own conclusions about why she wants Mollie to marry later in life.

Malika for her part is only three-and-a-half years old. Maybe this will all pass. Please...

A perfect book club outing ~ September 9, 1998

David Heiller

Our book club read Canoeing with the Cree, by Eric Sevareid, for our September discussion.

But instead of meeting at someone’s house in the evening, like we usually do, we held this book club on the Kettle River.

This is what bookclub usually looked like.
This was at our house.

We canoed from County Road 52 to Rutledge, about an eight mile stretch, on September 6.

There were eight canoes and 18 people. Usu­ally we have about 10 people at book club, but a fun outing on a gorgeous day attracted extra spouses and kids.

Cindy and I canoed the first half with a 16-year-old boy, Matt, in the middle. We hit a lot of shallow spots. The Kettle River is low, because of the dry summer. We had to get out of the ca­noe to pull it over rocks and sand many, many times.

At some places trees lay over the river. Sometimes we were able to float underneath them. One tree was about three feet above the river. Cindy bent low enough to slip under it. But I’m a lot bigger than her, so I climbed out of the canoe and onto the tree trunk while the canoe floated underneath. Then I got back in the canoe.

It wasn’t exactly the kind of challenge that Eric Sevareid and Walter Port faced on their ca­noe trip from Minneapolis to Hudson Bay.

At about the half way point, we stopped on a sandy shore and had a picnic lunch and dis­cussed the book. Everybody brought some food to share. Pat Ring laid a tarp down on the sand. People set out salads and fresh vegetables and fruit, most of it home grown.

Deane and Katherine Hillbrand on the Kettle River

There were breads and meat and cheese and sandwiches. I bet it was the fanciest picnic the Kettle River has ever seen. That’s one thing I like about Book Club. There’s always great food.

The discussion was good too, although it took Pat, who serves as the unofficial moderator, some hollering to bring us all together. The set­ting on the river was just right for the discus­sion, which was what we had in mind in the first place.           

We talked about how lucky Severeid and Port, who were both teenagers, had been on their trip, which started in Minneapolis and ended at Hud­son Bay. So many things could have gone wrong.

But their courage and strength played an equally big part. They tackled a huge wilder­ness, in awful weather, on dangerous rivers.

How many of us standing there would have turned back? Eric Severeid put it well in his author’s note: “Our journey was an example of what very young men can do—once in their lives—but never again!”

It’s important to do something like that when you are young and have the chance several people said. After the discussion, one of the college kids said the discussion made hint a little sad, because he didn’t know if he would be able to ever have an adventure like that.

He already had college loans piling up. He was feeling the pressure of having to get a job right after college. I think he wished he could head out to Hudson Bay instead of Duluth.

That made me think that young people today face more stress than people like Severeid and Port did in 1930.

We packed up the food and headed down the mighty Kettle River. Joel and Daina Rosen pulled their canoe up to ours. Joel wanted to sing songs. That was the perfect ending for the trip. Singing and canoeing go together like a paddle and water, But often I don’t do it. I get self-conscious. Joel doesn’t know what self-conscious is, at least when it comes to singing. His rich baritone voice carried over the river, and it sounded great.

Just like our book club trip down the river.

Keep your school bus window closed ~ September 7, 1989

David Heiller

School starts this week, and along with all the advice parents will be giving their children, I’d like to add this: If you ride on a school bus, keep your windows up.

Let me repeat that in a different way so that you understand clearly.

The narrator of this cautionary tale.

Don’t open your windows on the school bus, kids, unless it’s an emergency.

I know, there’s no rule that says you shouldn’t open school bus windows. And on a nice September morning with the smell of dew and apples drifting by, you may think I’m nuts. After all, my son is going to ride on a school bus 80 minutes a day, which works out to six and a half hours each week, or 10 days out of the year keeping Dave Nyrud company. Shouldn’t he be able to smell the burning leaves along the way?

Keep your window closed, Noah.

Take it from someone who rode a bus to high school for five years, and who has never forgotten that one morning, lo these 20 years ago...

My cousin, Jeff, was sitting in the fourth seat back, on the left side, like he always did. But I noticed how pale he looked the minute I swung past him and sat down next to the window that fine fall morning.

(I kept the window closed, although the Cool Kids at the back of the bus had theirs open. They had their windows open almost every day of the year, even in the dark of winter. I think it had something to do with the cigarettes they smoked.)

“I don’t feel so good,” Jeff admitted right away. “I threw up twice before getting on the bus this morning.”

“Why the heck are you going to school?” I asked.

“I feel pretty good now,” he swallowed. Jeff liked school, you might say.

But as the bus started up the hill toward Caledonia, Jeff seemed to grow even paler. His white face changed to an off-green with each pot hole we hit. He wasn’t talking either, which was unusual for Jeff, who usually boasted about his muskrat line or fishing or, lately, his girlfriends. His eyes fixed on the back of the head in front of us, but they didn’t see it, seeing instead something inside himself, something awful and lurking.

Even Dale, our bus driver, noticed it. He scanned us through the mirror on his windshield visor as we neared the top of the hill. “You okay?” he called back to us. Jeff had told him earlier, somewhat proudly, about his upset stomach. Dale was concerned for his passengers, but he was concerned about his bus too. He had to clean it.

Jeff swallowed again, twice in rapid succession. A weak “Yeah” was all we heard, as he nodded at Dale.

Everything was fine for the next minute. Then suddenly I felt a furious tapping on my left shoulder, as Jeff scrambled to his feet. I looked up at him; his cheeks were bulging, his face puffed out like a bull frog. He was gesturing frantically at the window.

Remember, it was closed. But not for long. I sprang up and pulled out the two side locks and slid the window down in an unofficial Guiness Book of World Record time of opening a school bus window, .079 seconds.

Cousins, a number of years 
and a number of tales later.

Jeff jammed his head out the narrow window, and his stomach contents came flying forth in a grand finale of what was once oatmeal and corn flakes.

If you’ve ever tried to spit out an open car window going 50 miles an hour, you know what happened next. The windows behind us were instantly coated, all the way back to where the Cool Kids sat, by their open windows. A fireman with a hose couldn’t have done a better job.

I won’t describe what was said next from the back of the bus. (I’ve already crossed the fine line between humor and good taste in this column.) But I’ll never forget Bobby Blair standing up in his seat back there, and taking off his glasses and cleaning off the oatmeal on his shirt tail.

So take it from Jeff, and me, and the Cool Kids: Don’t open your bus window, unless you have no other choice.

The first day of school has changed ~ September 4, 1997

David Heiller

The first day of school has changed around our house. Not too many years ago, the kids looked forward to returning to school. It was an exciting, nervous time. They wanted to see their old friends. They knew they would meet a few new ones. They were curious about their teachers.

Those early years of the
first-day-of-school photos were really fun.
(Noah is in first grade, Malika in kindergarten.)

When Dave Nyrud would pull up into the driveway with his school bus at 7:10 or so, they would jostle each other in an attempt to get on first.

I couldn’t talk the kids out of getting on the school bus on the first day of school, but it wouldn’t take much talking now.

For about the past three weeks, they have been lamenting the end of summer and the start of school.

I wouldn’t say the kids hate school. That’s too strong a word. But somewhere along the line, they have grown to not like it very much.

School used to be mostly fun. Now it’s mostly work.

That’s not surprising. A teacher’s job is to make the students work, and hopefully learn. A good teacher is someone who can make learning fun too. I tip my hat to them. It’s not an easy job. Too much fun and some stuffed shirt will complain, “You have to take education seriously.”

Yeah, but if you don’t enjoy what you are doing, you’ll never be very good at it, or you’ll be miserable, or both.

Most teachers have my respect. Cindy and I try to pass that attitude on to our kids. It’s important.

Some people bash teachers, and complain about their unions and their wages and their summers off. To them I say, “Go get your teaching license and give it a try.” Most people couldn’t cut it.

1997, the first-day-of-school
photos were not as much fun
 in 1997. But they were good
 sports, mostly.

Noah, who is in eighth grade, is quite articulate on the matter of returning to school. On Monday he called it a “travesty.” He has never used that word in a sentence before, to my knowledge. So school is teaching him something!

Mollie, now a seventh grader, isn’t as outspoken. But she has told me that she isn’t looking forward to school. She is afraid her classmates won’t like her new dress or new shoes. Peer pressure is a big part of her life. Some things never change.

Tuesday morning was chilly. Fall was in the air. So Mollie walked out the door wearing a jacket. Noah told her not to wear it, that she wouldn’t need it and that kids might tease her about it. So she took it off. It was a rare instance of her listening to her older brother.

I can’t say as I blame the kids for not being excited about school. Put yourself in their shoes. They’ve just had three months off. When was the last time you had three months off? Would you want to be going back to work after that? That’s what the kids are feeling.

So are teachers. But they are professionals and adults. They are making a good living. They can buck up and do their jobs.

The kids are still learning how to do that. Handling the emotions of returning to school is a big step in that direction.,

On the way to church on Sunday, Noah said for the umpteenth time that he was “bummed” that school was starting. Then he allowed that we must be sad too.

I hated to tell him that that was not quite accurate. But being an honest and sensitive dad, I pumped my fist in the air and said, “All right!”

Hey, a little gloating never hurt anyone. It gives the kids something to look forward to.

Yes, there are a few people who are happy about the return of the school year.

God bless the garden ~ September 6, 2001

David Heiller

Cindy has a calendar on her desk that has interesting sayings on it for every day of the year, except for the weekends, when two days are combined together.

Sometimes she hands me a saying on a busy day, when the phone is ringing and the com­puter is crashing, and I just glance at it before sending it flying into the waste basket.

I could probably benefit from those notes, but I don’t take the time to let them soak in.

But when she handed me the one reprinted at right, I stopped and read it and actually saved it, which must be the ultimate compliment to people who create daily calendars.

It sums up what I feel a lot these days. There isn’t a day that goes by this time of year when something from the garden doesn’t end up on the table.

If you have a garden, I bet you feel the same way.

Even the little ones are pleased with the bounty!

Cauliflower, broccoli, potatoes, onions, pep­pers, cucumbers, carrots, and beets are all tak­ing their turns on our dinner plates. Often they are served with meat that is “home-grown” too, such as venison or fish.

It’s a satisfying feeling, like the Good Book says, eating things that wouldn’t be here if not for you. It has been a great year for the garden. Plus if you don^’t grow something, or if a crop fails, there are people willing to give extra produce away. Two different families gave us green beans when they found out we didn’t plant any. (And my corn crop didn’t turn out, hint-hint.)

The one vegetable that I didn’t mention above deserves a paragraph all its own: tomatoes! They are the monarchs of the garden, voluptu­ous and wholesome all at the same time. We think—almost fantasize—about them all year, especially when we buy a pale imitation in the grocery store in February. We can’t wait for the taste of fresh tomatoes. That time is now.

There isn’t a better or simpler meal than a toasted bagel topped with cheese and home-grown tomatoes. I would choose it over the fan­ciest meal in a 10-star restaurant. It’s one of those things that money can’t buy.

They are thick on the vines. They are taking over counter space, and filling the freezer and canning shelves. Yet are the one vegetable that we don’t get tired of.

Hanging out with the beets.

Zucchinis, we get tired of. Tomatoes are like that favorite uncle that you hate to see leave at family get-togethers. They make all the work and mess of gardening worthwhile. They are the gardener’s ultimate reward.

It’s funny, tomatoes are so abundant now that you can barely give them away. But come Janu­ary, we are going to be longing for them, just like we will pine for a heat wave.