Still looking for the answers ~ August 29, 2002

David Heiller

That weekend, I am sure Noah 
would have rather been fishing.

Are you all packed up?” I asked my son on Sunday morning. “Yeah, I guess,” he said with his customary enthusiasm.

“Did you make a list?”

“No, I don’t need a list,” he said with disdain. I’m a list person when it comes to packing for a big outing like a canoe trip. And this was a big outing, even bigger than that. He was moving to a dormitory and going away to college.

I could tell he was nervous about it, the way he snapped at me, so I let it go, and a few others like it. Pick your battles, I say.

I probably did the same thing to Mom and my sister when I went off to college in 1971. I can still remember that car ride to the University of Minnesota, my sister chattering to keep me from getting too scared. Like I was chattering with my son on Sunday.

It didn’t help much. I still had to go into the dorm, sign at the desk, get a key, go up to the seventh floor, and meet two strangers, my roommates. It wasn’t easy, but I knew I had to do it. Like taking a slug of awful-tasting medicine.

Noah and his easy smile.

We found the dorm on Sunday, after a few detours and dead-ends. The key into the room didn’t work, so a girl had to come down from another dorm and give us a new one.

“This is a really nice room,” Cindy said as she bustled around. I was about to say that it felt like a prison cell, but she was quick to add, “Isn’t it, David?” and I had to agree. Yes, it is a great room.

My son and I made the top bunk, where he would sleep. Cindy and I helped him put a few things away. “I can do that,” he kept saying. So most of his belongings stayed in their crates and boxes. His sense of order is different than ours, to put it politely. It was stupid to think that this would suddenly change because he was in a dormitory. Sudden changes aren’t part of the natural order.

So we said our good-byes, me with a hand-shake, Cindy with a hug. Then it was down to the car, just the two of us. The car was empty, and so were we. That’s something we’ll have to get used to.

First day  of kindergarten.

Mom must have felt the same way those three decades ago. Something had come to an end. I was scared for my son. Worried about how he would do, if he would make it. But sure that he had to try it, had to get away from home.

We leave home in many different fits and starts. Some people seem to be able to do it with barely a glance back. Some barely leave at all. Some people are just plain independent. Others are just the opposite.

Leaving home is a big part of the journey in finding out who you are. It can lead to all kinds of adventures, from foreign countries to a home in rural Minnesota. From a scared college kid, to a worried parent. All these things keep changing.

I’d like to say that it is easy, that you can do it without butterflies in your stomach and clashes with your roommates. But it doesn’t work that way for too many people.

I put some of this into words to my son, but it came off as mostly boring advice from the land of bland. Like most of life, he’ll have to figure it out for himself. If we have done our job, he probably will, although it may take a while. I’m still working on it after 31 years.

That empty feeling ~ August 30, 2001

David Heiller

The empty feeling settled over me on Monday morning, August 27. I had been waiting for it to come, and when it hadn’t, I felt a bit puzzled and relieved. Bad feelings have a way of sneaking up on people.

Malika on her first day of 
kindergarten at Willow River.

I was lying in bed, trying to pry myself awake, when it finally hit, and I remembered that Mollie wasn’t upstairs. She wasn’t upstairs this morning, and she wouldn’t be upstairs tomorrow morning or the next.

We had taken her to Golden Valley the day before, in a car packed with boxes and bins, to her new home, a high school dormitory.

We were excited to see her room, to help her unpack, to meet her roommate, to look at the other kids filtering in. They all seemed to be equally excited and scared. I still remember those feelings from 30 years ago when I went away to college.

The parents looked the same way. Trying hard to be happy. Telling themselves, This is the right thing to do. We've thought this through. She’s ready for this. It will be good for her. And wondering if it was true.

Mollie heard about the Perpich Center for Arts Education last year. It is a high school that specializes in six areas: music, dance, literary arts, visual arts, media arts, theater. She wrote away for details. We went to an informational meeting with her. She met some teachers and students. She liked what she saw. We liked it too, but mostly because she did. The drive had to come from within her. She applied, did a vocal audition, and got accepted as a music student.

Malika on stage at the Perpich
Center For the Arts High School.

So I had a long time to prepare for that empty feeling. Sixteen years, to be exact. And I still wasn’t ready! The funny thing is, if you are ready for that, then your heart is a bit too hard.

The empty feeling will pass. I’ll adjust to it. Rational thought will rush in to fill the void. Cindy and I will watch Mollie grow and floun­der and flourish. Pick your adjective; she will probably experience it.

We’ll see her take many more steps like this. We have been watching those steps —and helping her when she stumbles—since 1985. At least I hope we get to see them.

Journeys come in all shapes and sizes. First day of school. First overnight. First trip to camp. First date. This is just another one, like it is for Mom and Dad.

So let me soak up the silence. That will help me get through it. No calling the dog to her room when she wakes up. No bickering with her brother. No marathon gab sessions with her girlfriends. No chatter about the movie she saw or about the boy she likes. No tears over mean words spoken at school. No bike rides down the gravel road. No quiet visits on the bench by the garden. No singing.

Dutch Jones told me a long time ago to enjoy my kids while I could, because they grow up too fast. I still remember that advice. I tried to keep it in mind. It still doesn't stop time from marching on. And we don’t want it to do that, because when you live in the past, you stop living.

The empty feeling will gradually fade away. I can feel it happening already. Then I’ll wait until the next one arrives, as it most certainly will.

A trip to Crooked Creek ~ August 12, 1993

David Heiller

My son Noah and I took on Crooked Creek last Saturday, and a trout fisherman might say we came out the worse for it. I would disagree.

We parked the car on a bridge off the main road. The bridge is a slab of concrete 30 feet long, with no sides. You wouldn’t want to drive off it. But it doesn’t wash away in the spring.

We had no idea how to fish Crooked Creek. This would be no Hollywood scene of a man in a vest and hat, bull-whipping 50 feet of line over his head. We were armed with three night crawlers and one worm from my mom’s compost pile, and two old rods and reels that we had scrounged from her basement.

We snuck up to a big cottonwood tree and dropped our lines in. The creek formed a pool around its roots, maybe six feet deep. We didn’t get a bite. The creek looked mighty inviting as it sliced through the trees toward us, cool and clean and wholesome on a hot August afternoon. So we walked down the road about half a mile, until a path cut through the grass toward the creek.

We followed it until we came to Crooked Creek. It was only 20 feet wide, and didn’t look like it could hold any trout. But you never know when you go fishing. That’s one reason it’s so fun.

I put the can of worms and tackle box in a mesh bag, and tied it to my belt. Then I walked to the center of the creek in my tennis shoes and shorts. The water came up to my knees. It was like turning on an air conditioner in a hot car. You couldn’t imagine a more perfect feeling.

I cast my worm downstream about 15 feet. That’s how far the line would reach. But it was far enough. On the first cast, I pulled in a 10-inch brown trout. That’s not big in anybody’s eyes except a 10-year-old’s and his father’s. It came in fighting awkwardly, because it had over-run the worm and hooked itself in the belly. It must have been pretty hungry to do that, I told Noah, and that made us even more excited. We let it go.

Noah with his grandma and sister in Brownsville.

Noah followed me in. He kept his shoes on too, and his sweat pants. He walked by my side, casting downstream. Pretty soon he caught a six-inch rainbow. It swallowed the hook, so we thought maybe Grandma’s cat would eat it, and threw it in the mesh bag.

The first few of my casts ended up in branches overhead. At places the trees formed a wide canopy over the creek. Some debris clung to branches five feet above the water, marking the crest of the spring floods.

I wondered how trout fisherman could play out all that line without a big mess. But I soon got the hang of avoiding the branches. It just takes practice, I thought to myself.

Noah asked me if there were any snapping turtles in Crooked Creek, and I answered yes. I had seen some here the size of hubcaps in my youth. Noah froze in place. He has a vivid im­agination, and was seeing the worst. I moved on and reassured him that they wouldn’t approach a human. He moved a few steps. I caught another fish, and told him that they don’t like fast water anyway. He soon caught up with me.

Noah and his Dad: a special bond

We walked side by side, talking about where to cast, where the fish would be hiding. An old bridge had washed out in the midst of some rapids. That looked promising, we decided. We cast below it and each caught a couple.

It was fun, walking down the middle of Crooked Creek. We talked about a lot of things. The water seemed to draw us out and make us happy and excited. Every bend held a new view of the creek, a new possibility for five pound rainbows and 20 pound snapping turtles.

It was finally suppertime. You don’t want to be late when Grandma makes supper. We left the creek and trudged through tall weeds back to the road and the car. We drove past Crooked Creek cemetery. All my relatives there must have been envious. How many of them had trout fished with their kids, or with their parents, on a hot summer afternoon in Crooked Creek?

The past 90 minutes of fishing would be hard to beat, I thought. Not by fishing standards. We didn’t get any keepers, and we lost twice as many as we caught.

Some fisherman might say we came out the worse for it. A true fisherman would recognize that we caught something more valuable than fish.

The cat didn’t want Noah’s trout. It ended up in the compost pile, where it will help make worms for future trips to Crooked Creek.

The good life of working together ~ August 11, 1994

David Heiller

It was late on Sunday by the time Cindy and I got to the beans. It was on our list on Saturday morning, at least in our heads, along with numerous other chores. But by the time we’d weeded flower beds and cleaned the house and baked bread and cleaned the freezer (to name a few), it was Sunday evening.

Beets!

To make matters worse, when we cleaned the freezer, we had found a dozen packages of frozen beans from last year’s garden. And here was another bumper crop waiting impatiently. Maybe that’s why we didn’t get to them till so late, why we weren’t excited about it.

But we finally grabbed four ice cream buckets at about 7 p.m. on Sunday, and tackled the beans.

It was a two-person job. We were tired, that Sunday-night kind of tired where you just want to curl up with a book or take a leisurely bike ride.

But with that other person across the row, working at the same easy pace, the job wasn’t so bad. In fact, it was good.

Queen Ida helping in the garden

We talked about this and that. We admired some beans, and tossed out others that rabbits had nibbled. When we found a nice cluster, we showed them to the other person.

Without Cindy there, it would have been a tedious job, and I would have grumbled. My thoughts would have been on that book or that bike ride.

But somehow Cindy and the garden made things good, which is the way things usually go. We filled three and a half buckets, and I thought, “I couldn’t have done that alone.”

We put the kids to bed and took a sauna. We took the beans with us, and snapped them there. We joked about that. “Sauna Seasoned,” we called them, and “Sauna Steamed.” A new brand.

Maybe we could sell them in Finlayson or Kettle River, to the Finlanders.

We went in the house at 9:30. We didn’t want to freeze any beans. We wanted to go to bed. But I said I’d do it if she’d do it, and she said the same thing, so we stayed up till 10:15, cutting and blanching and bagging and freezing two gallons of beans.

We both felt good about the evening. Partly it was that feeling you get when you overcome fatigue and finish a job that needs to be done.

Canning the syrup, another good two person job!

But more than that, it was knowing that you couldn’t have done it, or wouldn’t have done it, without that someone special by your side.

I often wonder how people raise gardens without the help of their spouse or significant other. It wouldn’t be nearly as fun. You wouldn’t have anyone to work with. When you got tired, you wouldn’t have that other person pick up your end a little, or offer encouragement.

“Come on, let’s go pick beans.”

“I’ll freeze them if you will.”

Life is like that, I guess. The good life.

Taking piano lessons from a daughter ~ June 3, 1993

David Heiller

“Sounds good, Mollie.” I can say that in all honesty because I’m the father of a girl who is learning to play the piano.

OK, so it’s not a real piano. We’re still looking for one of those. It’s an electronic keyboard, the kind that can make all kinds of fake noises. Right now she is switching from the sound of a Star Wars handgun to something you might hear in the background of a Stephen King movie.

Mozart she ain’t. But she’s already way past me in her piano-lesson knowledge. She just proved that to me. I asked her which songs she liked the best.

“I have two favorite ones. I don’t know which one I like the best. I like The Butterfly and Bluebells of Scotland.”

Why? “For one thing, this one has two of these ones that go together. Two and five and one, you push them together and four and two, you push them together.”

She made a chord to show me what she meant. “Five one, four two,” she sang. “Two of them go together, like that. You get it now? It’s like that three and one, except that it’s five and one and four and two.”

Practicing Christmas songs.

Have you ever been lectured by a seven year old? It’s a humbling experience. But I can take it, if she keeps playing the piano.

The other night I went to get milk, and I heard Mollie practicing her songs. The notes filtered down from her bedroom window in the evening like the singing of an oriole. When I got home—half an hour later, she was still playing. I looked up and smiled. It was even better than a bird song.

Cindy works with Mollie on her lessons. One evening she put me in charge. “Make sure she bends her fingers like this,” Cindy said, threatening me with a claw-like hand. “And she should be hitting the half note for two counts.” She started to go on, but my eyes had glazed over, so she didn’t bother.

I did sit on her bed and watch and listen and say nice things. I guess that’s important too.

Lately, Mollie has been having trouble with Bluebells of Scotland, so a grown-up friend stopped over on Sunday evening and spent half an hour with her on it.

“She pointed to the notes and then I did it,” Mollie told me. She demonstrated it for me. It sounded hard, but she played it well. Like I said at the start, it sounds good to me.

Friends like that, and Mollie’s good teacher, make me think that my daughter will stick with the piano. She’s been at it for a whole six weeks.

Most of my brothers and sisters can play the piano, and I envy that. I took lessons from my sister Mary Ellen for about two days when I was a kid, but it didn’t interest me. Maybe that’s because my sister was teaching me.

David always was making music.
Not 'knowing' how didn't stop him from playing the
organ at the old Brownsville school. He did just fine.

Danny and I used to tease my sisters when they would play. We had a cat named Lionel who would occasionally walk across the piano keys, making a ragged sound, and we would yell at the cat to get off. So when my sisters would practice the piano, we would yell “Lionel!” They didn’t appreciate it. Neither did the cat.

(We now have a cat named Emma, and if I ever hear Noah yell her name while Mollie is practicing, he’ll be in his room for a week.)

Now I wish I had practiced more and smarted off less. Then I could teach Mollie a few things, instead of the other way around.

I wonder where she will end up with the piano. Maybe she’ll play like Joy Novak, or Birdie Storebo, two people who can play just about any song by ear. I’d like that. These two people live up to their names. How much joy has Joy brought with her piano playing? And if Birdie doesn’t sound like a birdie when she plays, no one does.

Maybe she’ll play like her teacher, Pepper, who Mollie loves because she smiles and laughs and she’s cute. I’d like that too.

Or maybe Mollie will sit down in front of a class of first graders and play “The Marvelous Toy” and a million other songs, like Jeannie Mach. I’d like that very much.

Even if she doesn’t reach such piano pinnacles, I’ll be happy. She just brought me a picture of two axes, done like a shield of arms in colored marker. It is signed “I love you Dad, love Mollie.” On the other side of the paper are the words and music of one of her first songs. It’s my favorite, because it is called “Baseball Days,” and I am a baseball fan, and she knows it. It goes like this: “Come on boys, join the fun, baseball days have begun.”

I’d play it for you on the piano if I could, but I can’t. Guess I’ll just ask Mollie.

Miss Emma knows when fall is near ~ August 16, 1990

David Heiller

If Miss Emma could talk, she might tell you that fall is just around the corner. Other famous female weather watchers like Helen Feldt, Dutch Jones, and Sue Thue can put their noses to the air and sense that fall is close by.

Miss Emma was a good hunter,
but her only opportunity for bird
hunting was from the picture window.

Dutch knows it when her bear friends out east of Bruno stop making amorous advances and head for a warm winter bed.

Helen knows it when the temperatures in the Cloverton area drop below 40 degrees and threaten tomato crops.

Sue knows it when she starts daydreaming about the smell of her wild rice parching west of Sandstone.

But Miss Emma knows it’s fall when the mice start to move into the house. Miss Emma, you see, is our cat.

Miss Emma, like all cats, is fat, lazy and ar­rogant. But she can catch mice. She doesn’t eat them. Instead, she lays them out for us to see, like trophies. In the late fall, she will sometimes have three mice in a neat row on the hearth of the stove for us to admire.

So when Cindy heard a mouse in our bedroom three weeks ago, she called on Miss Emma. I was at a school board meeting at the time, so she told me about it when I staggered in at 1 a.m.

“There’s a MOUSE in this room,” she said in the same tone as she might say tomorrow, “Saddam Hussein has just dropped nerve gas on New York City.” A dead-serious voice. She had even seen it run across the floor and duck under her nightstand.

An opportunist.

“Oh yeah?” I said. It didn’t seem like nerve-gas news to me. Then of course I wondered, like all sexist males: Why are women so darned afraid of a little old mouse? And I smiled self-righteously and fell into a comfortable sleep.

The next morning, Cindy called Miss Emma in, carried her upstairs, and locked her in our bedroom for the day, with instructions to catch The Mouse.

Miss Emma let us down this time, because we heard The Mouse again the next night. Cindy saw it run into the closet. Somewhere in our closet. (It’s hard to tell where in our closet.) Scratching. Gnawing. Scampering. Break danc­ing. There’s nothing quite as loud as a mouse in a room where you are trying to sleep, in the middle of a black night.

The next day I called Miss Emma, carried her to the bedroom and locked the door. This time she succeeded, or at least gave The Mouse a scare, because we didn’t hear any more noises after that.

That is, until this past Monday morning. I was sitting at the kitchen table. Cindy had gone upstairs to wake the kids. And she screamed. Not your typical cry of surprise or anger. Not a shriek, not a wail, not a yell, not a yowl. Not a holler, a hoot or a screech or a howl.

We’re talking scream, folks. Texas Chainsaw Massacre style. It didn’t last long, maybe half a second, but it raised my hair on end. I dashed upstairs. Cindy was standing by the doorway of our bedroom, pointing at the floor where she had just stepped, barefoot, squarely on top of a dead mouse.

The Missing Sock Basket: 
a wonderful spot for Miss Emma.

If it wasn’t dead before, it was dead now.

I didn’t laugh, honest. That may have saved our marriage.

Cindy hugged Malika, whose hair was also standing on end like mine. (Cindy’s hair was not only standing on end, it had actually turned a slight shade of gray.) I picked up the mouse by the tail and showed the kids the source of Mama’s scream and Miss Emma’s pride.

Yes, she was proud. She came upstairs and rubbed against Cindy’s leg, until Cindy had to bend down and pet her and laugh and thank her. A grudging thank you, but a thank you none-the-less.

Yup, it’s official in our house: fall is just around the corner. Just ask Miss Emma. Cindy could tell you, too.

Murphy strikes again, and again ~ August 31, 1989

David Heiller

Everybody knows Murphy’s Law, which states: “If anything can go wrong, it WILL go wrong. There are many other Murphy Laws, which I’ve mentioned from time to time. Mike Hruby, Askov school superintendent, calls these “Murphy’s Laws of Random Perversity:

1. Left to themselves—all things go from bad to worse.

2. Anything that can go wrong—will go wrong and at the worse possible moment.

One of Murphy's children.

3. If there is a possibility of several things going wrong—the one that will go wrong is the one that will do the most damage.

4. If you play with a thing long enough—you will surely break it.

5. If everything appears to be going well—you have obviously overlooked something.

6. Nature always sides with the hidden flaw.

There is one other one that parents all know by heart, Murphy’s Law 17-C: “If children are going to misbehave, they will do it at the worst possible time.”

That came true this weekend for our family. We were at my mom’s house for a mini-family reunion on Sunday. With my brother and sister and a houseful of children all present, our son, Noah, decided he didn’t want to eat the Sunday dinner.

It started when I wouldn’t let him stand under the white cedar tree with his cousin to coax a black squirrel into eating a peanut out of his hand. I have a rule that only one cousin per black squirrel is allowed under the cedar tree, but Noah didn’t know that rule, and protested with tears.

I am quite certain that there must be a Murphy's law pertaining to going in the kiddie pool fully clothed and with shoes on.

So, I carted him off to the bedroom, banished, until he could stop crying. Meanwhile the chicken and pork and creamed corn and tomatoes and potato salad waited in stony silence, along with the house full of relatives.

Noah finally stopped crying, and came out to look at the kids’ table. But he didn’t have a chair to sit on, only the cushioned box, so it was back to the bedroom in tears.

(Which brings up Murphy’s Law, 17-D: When a child can’t think of anything to cry about, they can come up with some real doozies.)

So we ate without him, in stony silence. He wouldn’t budge, and I wouldn’t budge. Finally my sister, Jeanne, went in and mediated. I don’t know what she said, but before long he was at the table, on the box, cleaning his plate and acting fine, which is his normal behavior.

(Murphy’s Law, 17-E: When you reach an impasse, ask your sister for help.)

We started talking again around the table, and I thought about making some excuse, but my sister and brother both looked so relieved that it wasn’t their kids doing this that I didn’t bother. My wife, Cindy, broke the ice. “Did your kids ever act like that?” she asked Jeanne, who has two kids, age eight.

“Yeah, for about seven years,” Jeanne sighed.

I guess they know about Murphy’s Law 17-C.

A good time at the park—bearly ~ July 21,1994

David Heiller

 A mother bear lay at the base of a big red pine tree in St. Croix State Park last Sunday afternoon.

In the top of the tree sat three cubs. They were draped over the branches like little rugs on a clothesline, swaying in a summer breeze.

My daughter and I stopped our bicycles for a look. A hiker had told us about them.

“I’m going to go look at them,” Malika said. My heart was beating fast, but I didn’t say no. I figured she was bluffing. “Don’t get too close,” I said.

Malika got off her bike, and walked five steps into the grass. The bear was about 10 yards away. I was just ready to tell her to stop, when she stopped. Something told her that she was close enough. I was glad of that.

The mother bear flicked her ears at us. Her eyes opened and closed. Flies buzzed around her head. She seemed to be trying to take a nap.

Maybe that’s why she had shooed her kids upstairs. Time to watch a soap opera. As The Bicycle Wheel Turns.

We stood there and watched the mother and cubs. I told Malika how fast bears can run. Faster than a dog, I said. “Faster than. Ida?” Malika asked, speaking of our dog, who is very fast indeed. “Yes,” I said.

Just then the bear reared up on its hind legs so quickly your eyes couldn’t see, it. She let out a beller, and so did I, and so did Malika.

My daughter looked like Roy Rogers jumping onto Trigger. That’s how quickly she moved, hopping onto her bike. We laughed in relief and pedaled away. Then I looked over my shoulder and said, “She’s coming after us!”

I have never seen a nine-year-old pedal as fast as Malika did on her little one speed bike. It took me a minute to catch her. Imagine Wily Coyote trying to catch the Roadrunner. That gave her enough time to smile sheepishly. She knew she’d been tricked, and gave me her “Yeah right, Dad” look. Then I laughed at my joke. It was bearly funny.

It was probably a little dangerous too. Curt Rossow will call again any day now. “First a perch on the hook, Dave, and now you’re harassing bears?” I know the dangers of mother bears and their cubs. Now Malika knows about it too.

As Alexander Pope once wrote: “A little danger is a learning thing. Approach a bear, and down the road you’ll wing.” Or something like that.

We saw other wildlife at the park. A doe with two fawns bounded away as we biked through the woods on the smooth, blacktop trail. Another deer stood quietly eating while we stopped and looked at her.

It was so peaceful, talking quietly, riding beneath the green canopy of leaves. Earlier in the afternoon, we met quite a few other bicyclists. Most of them cleared out by evening. That’s when the park was at its magical best. The evening sun floated over the ferns, and filled the sides of popple trees with columns of yellow light.

How lucky we are to have places like St. Croix State Park, I thought. Or Banning State Park. My wife and I had a half hour to spare last week, before going to our son’s final summer baseball game. Banning was on the way, so we stopped there.

We walked hand in hand down the self-guided trail. The sound of wind in the pine trees mixed with the rush of the Kettle River. The trees made a green arch overhead. It was just what we needed.

It’s too bad we had to squeeze that trip into our schedule. It’s too bad people are so busy.

But it’s good that we have places like Banning or St. Croix, for when we can spare that half hour or half day.

They are places to visit with your friends, or your family. Places where you can marvel at the power of a river, places where you can build a sand castle with a little girl. Places to read the Sunday paper and listen to the Twins, even though they’ll probably lose. It’s not so bad when you’re at a park.

And you never know when you’ll meet a bear.

August days can be heavenly ~ August 15, 1996

David Heiller

This is the time of year we all yearned for back in February. Breezy August days. Low humidity. Temperature in the 70s. Big puffy clouds floating like ships across the sky.

The kind of day that puts a spring in everyone’s step, even when you’re working. Even when something goes wrong, when the printer doesn’t work right, when a customer is rude. It’s hard to get angry on days like these.

Life slows down this time of year at our house. I think we are trying to slow it down, to make it last, it is so good.

Our garden, our personal grocery store.

Like at supper-time. You can’t rush supper this time of year, especially when it comes from the garden. You go out and walk around the beds and decide what you want.

Potatoes, onions, beets, cucumbers, zucchini, broccoli, chard, kohlrabi, lettuce. Raspberries for dessert. Having a big garden is like having a grocery store in your yard.

It’s always changing too. The peas are mostly done. The beans are just starting. Carrots and sweet corn are right around the corner. Squash and pumpkins are growing bigger every day.

And don’t forget the tomatoes. How would you like a B-L-T with a homegrown tomato for supper? Is your mouth watering? Come on, be honest. Life doesn’t get any better than that.

Those rides are so dear to me!

After supper, Cindy and I and a kid or two and the two dogs like to take a bike ride around the block. Each block is a mile long.

First we go north down a township road. It’s gravel, but our bikes ride over it smoothly. We seldom meet a car. It’s very peaceful. Talk comes easily, and silences are comfortable.

Then we turn east. The road splits between the empty buildings of an old farm stead. I wonder who used to live there? Someday I’ll find out.

On that same road, it goes past the sparkling farm of Henry and Dorothy Mikrot. It’s a farm that looks like it belongs on a calendar for the month of August. We like to slow down and take in all the flowers and gardens and neat buildings as we pedal past.

Then it’s south a mile to County Road 46, where we stop by a creek that runs under the road. The dogs like to wade into it and take big gulps of water. They catch their breath there.

Then it’s back home on the blacktop, which seems like a treat after three miles of gravel.

Evening bike rides in August, with the sun setting and the air cool, just can’t get any better. They can make a long, hard day a lot easier to handle. They help us sort out the details of our life.

And don't forget a little hammock time!

And lately the days have been ending with perfect nights. Perfect for sitting around a campfire playing music. Or working in the kitchen, listening to the Twins on the radio. Or sitting in the living room with the windows open reading a book. Or walking down the road watching stars blaze across the sky.

Or sleeping. August nights are perfect for sleeping. Leave the window open and the air is cool enough to start cuddling again. Hey, that’s even better than home grown tomatoes!

There are a lot of ways to describe Heaven. A summer day in August is a pretty good start.