Behind the Lines: by David Heiller

David Heiller   Tree swallows were weaving a net over us last Saturday morning. They seemed to perch on every Al Jensen bluebird house in sight. Bluebird Tree swallow I have nothing against tree swallows. They are confident and beautiful, and they eat a lot of mosquitoes. All great traits in a bird. But we needed a bluebird. They are on the top of my list in the bird world. They always remind me of my Grandma Schnick, for some reason, of the good old days. Their red breast and soft blue color almost take my breath away. I had staked a claim on the bench in the backyard, with muffins, coffee, and a banjo. Cindy joined me. That’s when we started looking for bluebirds. “We usually see them by your Mom,” I said. Lorely’s ashes are buried on a little knoll next to the pond. “And there it is,” Cindy said. I’m not making this up. The bluebird appeared as if on cue, on the bird house where we always see it. The little knoll by the pond, a favorite  bluebird nesting...

by David Heiller It rained all day Saturday, a light mist of a rain. Some people probably cussed at it. But from the garden it made me glad. That’s where I spent most of the day, shoveling, raking, tilling. My T-shirt stuck to my back like, well, like a wet T-shirt. My gloves got coated with mud. So did my boots, and the rake and fork and tiller. We were all one soggy mess. But the rain felt good, all six-tenths of an inch. Kids love the rain. We weren’t exactly in a drought. It had snowed eight inches just 17 days earlier. But the potatoes and lettuce and peas needed a drink. So did the corn and alfalfa. So did the roadsides along Highway 23, where train sparks have sent firemen a-scurrying and trees a-dying. So did the perennials that Elaine Pearson and Dorothy Nelson gave me last fall, forget-me-nots and delphiniums, primrose and daisies, and a bunch of others that I can’t even identify. Their leaves sprinted out of the ground with the rain. We heard it start i...

 David Heiller The sun was shining, the birds singing, the bees buzzing. You name the spring cliché, and it was there last Thursday morning. Oh gardens! Little Claire lends a helping hand later in the season And the garden was the biggest magnet of them all. I could feel its pull even as I knotted my tie, grabbed my briefcase, and headed out the door for work. I almost made it too. But the garden looked so inviting. I walked to it. A week of unseasonable weather had dried out the raised beds. I grabbed a clump of some nameless weed. It pulled out easily. I shook the dirt and earthworms from the roots, and tossed it on the grass. I was hooked. Back in the house, I slipped a pair of coveralls over my dress clothes. Tie and all. I grabbed the garden fork, and went back to the garden. Loosen the soil, pull up the weed, shake off the dirt, toss the weed aside. Repeat. Repeat. Again. Again. Malika helps to plant. I found a carrot that had been passed over las...

David Heiller What makes a good teacher? I found myself asking that question this week, for a couple reasons. One reason was Rocky Kroon’s letter to the editor, which appears on this page. Rocky doesn’t write letters to the editor every week, or every year. His words are sincere, as he tells about one good teacher, good in the classroom and in the community. Please read it. The other reason started with an incident last week at Askov Deep Rock. A group of people were standing at the counter, passing time. George Frederiksen told Pat Mee some fire department news. “You’d better write it down and put it in your pocket,” I joked to Pat. Pat is the kind of guy who has a pocketful of notes to help him remember. His coverall pockets sometimes bulge like a file cabinet, filled with his notes. “I’ve got a better idea,” Pat said, as he took his pen and wrote his reminder on the back of his hand. The school and school-yard in Brownsville  where Mrs. Sauer  taught y...

David Heiller Cindy and I stood on the observation platform of Lock and Dam Number 10 last Wednesday, April 18. Locks and dams on the upper Mississippi. The Mississippi River was high. It was almost flowing over the top of the lock. A lock is like a long cement chute with a gate on either end. The locks are used to move boats past the dams. In normal weather they tower over the boats, except for towboats. But the river had swallowed up the locks. We talked about the houses we had just seen upstream in Guttenburg, Iowa. Dozens of them were flooded. The road ran between them had been replaced by the main channel of the river. It was a strange sight. I struck up a conversation with another guy on the platform. “Did you see those houses under water up there?” I asked. “Yeah, we live in one of them,” he answered. He and his family had one of the few houses that wasn’t yet flooded on the island. He had come to town in a boat, going very slowly and carefully. You would not w...

David Heiller The best part of the trip came at the end, when “Dave” and I paddled down the Kettle River last Saturday morning. (In case you don’t read Dear Abby, when a name is in quotations, it’s not their real name, although I’ve often wondered if people don’t put the person’s real name in the quotes, just to be funny.) “Dave” took care of the logistics, as usual. “We’ll put the two canoes in your truck, and then drive my van to the bridge at 46,” he told me when I pulled into his driveway at 9:30. The idea was to then drive my truck to a spot up-stream, park the truck, paddle downstream about eight miles to County Road 46, then get in his van with his canoe and go back for the truck. I would pick up my canoe on the way home. And that’s what happened, mostly. The Kettle River had never looked finer to me than that morning. Cold, deep, and in a hurry. A river in flood is like a magnet to me. We slipped the canoes over huge slabs of shore ice and into the water. It q...

David Heiller Spring has a way of uncovering lost treasures although sometimes you have to help her. Take my folding saw, for instance. Cindy bought it for me last Christmas. I had wanted one for a long time. I could use it to prune trees and to cut firewood on camping trips. A folding saw would be real handy, I figured. I talked about the need for a folding saw for a couple years. Cindy finally got tired of that, so she bought me one. It was my favorite gift. One of the functions of a spouse is to buy things like folding saws. That should be a marriage vow. PASTOR: Do you promise to love, honor, and buy handy things for your husband? BRIDE: I do! I started using the folding saw right away, to cut branches and small trees on our snowshoe trails in the woods. It worked great. The teeth were razor sharp. But it was a bit awkward to carry. I tried putting it in my pocket, but it was too big for that, so I put it in my fanny pack. Then one day in the woods, in the middl...

David Heiller The scene didn’t make sense, last Friday morning in Willow River. The air had that early April feeling to it, nippy and fresh and crystal clear. The sun had a brighter touch too, as it warmed the frost off the brown lawns, and warmed the robins that jumped from tree to tree above the grass, already hoping for earthworms. But smoke curled above the houses in Willow River, clouding this bright spring morning and all the hope that it should have brought along. The smoke oozed from the rafters and walls and basement of a frame home, once white, now blackened and broken. A dozen or so firemen from Willow River and Sturgeon Lake stood outside the shell of a house. They stood in pockets, here and there. They stood alongside the hole in the ground where a backhoe pawed through blackened debris. Their faces were gray with soot and smoke, their eyes hung with a sleepless night. And they seemed to stoop, in a barely perceptible way that is brought on by more than fatigue...

By David Heiller An Easter miracle occurred last weekend. When we left for a family get-together in Minneapolis Saturday morning, a foot of snow covered the landscape at our home in Birch Creek Township. When we returned Monday afternoon, all the snow had melted. It was like seeing a nephew you hadn’t seen in years, and suddenly he is a foot taller, with a deeper voice and stubble on his face. Malika  and Miss Emma outside  in the small window between "The Snow is GONE! and the mud is here!" But what a sight on Monday. The woodpile gaped like an open wound. I located the pile of slab-wood that didn’t get stacked before our Thanksgiving storm. The bent hood of an old Ford truck emerged, plus sheets of tin for a roofing project. And those rusty band saw blades from an old sawmill were curled where I left them. Waiting. The garden sneered at us, cornstalks and Brussels sprouts leaning this way and that. Weren’t we supposed to clean that last fall, a...

David Heiller  My wife and I have been trying to sell our son on staying with his Grandma Olson ever since Noah brought the idea up two months ago. We had been visiting there, and Noah had enjoyed the fruits of the labor of a grandmother who has only two grandchildren, the oldest of whom is Noah. In other words, he’s had a darn good time with Grandma. Noah and Grandma (Lorely Olson) Grandmas who live in Suburbia have the keys to a wonderful world for a three-year-old. First there are the shopping malls, which have stores that sell nothing but toys for children. Grandma Olson is on a first name basis with every toy store clerk in Brooklyn Center. She can walk through Brookdale blindfolded. Grandma also knows about stores that are gigantic amusement parks for kids. They are like toy stores with the packages already opened. Gigantic trampolines, rooms with padded walls and huge balls to bounce off other kids. Children love them. So do parents who want to farm out...