Taking home the priceless treasures ~ March 16, 1989

David Heiller

Grandma Schnick

If you put all the items together, there is hardly enough to make a garage sale purchase: an afghan, some drinking glasses, a framed needlework, a platter and cake plate, a toy teapot, and two rocks.

Maybe you’d get 10 bucks for the whole works. Practically worthless.

But look a little closer.

The afghan, with rows of bright flowers, each different, fitted amid a black border, you’d hardly guess it’s over 100 years old, but I know it’s a work of art to cuddle under on the living room couch in the winter.

The drinking glasses, with pheasants flying off them, pheasants we could feel and almost hear as we drank milk around the crowded kitchen table when company came.

David with Grandma Schnick and his sister Lynette.

The tiny silver teapot that sat on the white cabinet next to the kitchen sink. The lid, etched with lace, doesn’t fit snugly anymore, but it is perfect for a little girl pretending to be grown up, or a big girl remembering the child.

The platter from Germany on the wall over the sewing machine, part of the living room ever since Danny sent it from Germany 20 years ago. His name is still carefully written on a piece of masking tape on the back, for Grandma to remember a thoughtful grandson, and for Danny too.

David and Grandma Schnick. 
(Detail from a larger photo.)

On another wall, an oval frame that holds a cluster of blue flowers on a burlap back. The flowers are yarn, a simple cluster made beautiful by the old frame and thick glass and a granddaughter’s patient handiwork.

The glass cake platter that sits like a monarch in the china cupboard on a carved pedestal, the reigning king of all other dishes, cups, and saucers. Grandma respected its rank, and only took it out for company.

Above the cake platter, hiding behind a cup, an owl. That’s what Grandma called it. She found it on an ocean beach in Texas, a piece of white quartz with a red top and two spots that stare like an owl, as any kid can see, an owl surprised from its afternoon nap.

Grandma Schnick's rocks,
one the surprised owl and
one amazingly smooth and round.

And anther rock, black, the size of a quarter, a half inch thick, and perfectly round and smooth. Perfectly. It almost looks man-made, but it’s a rock all right. Grandpa found, it on a walk with Grandma in 1950. She put it in her purse, and kept it there. She used to take it out once a-year or so and show it to me. She would hold it between her thumb and forefinger and rub it like a good luck charm. I wished Grandma would give it to me, but she never offered, and I knew better than to ask. Until now.

We saw these things most of our life. We took them for granted, but they grew on us, just like Grandma did, and became a part of us. When we looked again last Sunday, in the cupboards and on the walls, we found treasures, not worthless, but priceless.

An owl now sits in our kitchen on a shelf, watching over us sleepily. A little black rock, perfectly smooth, lies in my sock drawer. My daughter already likes it as much as I do. She feels its smooth surface, and spins it like a top. I’ll take it out and show it to her about once a year or so.

To cut, and not to cut ~ March 26, 1992

David Heiller 

The widow maker stood in our woods last Thursday morning, calmly waiting for a man to come its way.

Deane circled it cautiously; chainsaw in hand, the way a cowboy might circle a raging black stallion. He eyed the basswood tree, which had snapped in a strong west wind about eight feet above the ground. Its top rested on four other basswoods, and a large birch, all of which were bent from the extra weight.

What I saw was a lot of firewood, dry on the stump, waiting for my woodstove. What Deane saw was a spring loaded, three-ton wooden widow maker.

Finally he turned to me with a grin. “I’m not cutting that down,” he said. “Mother nature will take care of it for you.”

I was surprised, for perhaps two seconds. Deane Hillbrand handles a chainsaw better than anyone I’ve ever seen. He builds log and timber frame homes for a living. Trees fall where he wants them to.

Deane and Kathryn Hillbrand

But part of a person’s skill with a tool includes knowing what he cannot do, or more precisely, what he should not do. He might have cut the widow maker just fine. But a tree under pressure might fall the wrong way, or snap and spring where you least expect it. That’s why broken trees like those are called widow makers. Α cord of firewood wasn’t worth the risk of a crushed limb, or worse.

We walked on through the woods, on top of the crusted snow, looking for more trees. It was lovely walking, above the deadfall and under-brush. The whole woods seemed open and inviting.

Deane had come over to cut a basswood. He wanted to make some chair seats, and needed some wide boards. Our woods hold some huge basswood. The honey bees love them, and we love their honey. So I love those basswoods. But I told him he could have one off our land, if he would cut some trees.

First Deane spied a dead birch. He dropped it where he wanted, then told me gently, “You’re not cutting this up for firewood.”

“Why?”

“This is a saw log,” he answered. It was a handsome length of log, 22½ feet long, and solid.

I had looked at the birch and seen firewood. Deane had seen boards. But he was right. It would be a travesty to cut a log like that into firewood. There was plenty of firewood in the top branches.

We moved west, over a frozen creek. A skin of ice crashed underneath us. I plummeted a whole six inches until stopping on solid ice. Six inches or six feet, your heart still pounds when that happens.

Deane spotted two red oaks, one dead, the other nearly so. “I hate to say it, Dave,” he began with a laugh. He didn’t have to finish. Another saw log. Sure enough, after he dropped it, we measured 34 feet from the 25-inch butt to the first limbs. We counted 93 rings on the trunk. It has started growing about the time Grandma Schnick was born. There is plenty of firewood in the top, I thought again.

We left the other red oak standing, which was even bigger. It had a few years of life yet; a few branches had budded out. It would wait right where it was.

We found and cut a few other dead birch and maple, which were pure firewood trees. I shouldn’t say we. Deane had the sharper eyes and the sharper saw. I walked along and enjoyed the easy hiking on the firm snow, enjoyed the sunny, 25-degree morning, enjoyed the hawks and nuthatches, and enjoyed watching Deane work.

As we neared the edge of the woods, Deane pointed to a lone tree about 50 yards ahead. “Look at that white oak,” he said. Sure enough, when we got up to it, it was a huge old white oak that was also dying.

“Let’s cut it down,” I said with a little hesitancy. This was an old, old tree, and you don’t cut down trees like that without a lump in your throat. But like the others we had cut, it was dead or dying. There are plenty of other trees for the pileated woodpeckers and red squirrels.

Noah playing 'jack-in-the-box' an elm
stump Deane assisted us with in an earlier year.

Deane cut his notch, then ran the 20-inch bar through the bottom of the tree, working from both sides. At first, it didn’t fall. I stood behind a tree 30 feet away. Another widow maker? Deane eyed his escape path. He always clears a path to safety if a tree doesn’t cooperate. He pounded a wedge into the crack until the wedge disappeared. Then the white oak sighed and tumbled and hit the snow with a final crash.

We counted the rings on the trunk: 182. This tree was already 108 years old when the Moose Lake Fire of 1918 swept north of our land. “It’s probably the oldest tree in your woods,” Deane said.

Deane discovered a hollow section starting 14 feet up the trunk. He cut a two-foot-long piece, then hollowed the rotten part out with his saw Perfect flower planters for Cindy, I thought.

Below that was saw log. Above it was firewood, lots of it.

I asked Deane to cut a 4-inch-thick slice from the stump. It is 43-inches across. I’m going to sand it and oil it and count the rings and think of all it has seen.

By then it was after noon. The crusty snow was starting to break up. We trudged in for chicken soup and corn bread and maple syrup.

Deane never did cut his basswood tree. Somehow it wouldn’t have seemed right to cut down a healthy, living tree. Deane knows what you should cut, and what you shouldn’t.

Never too old to learn ~ March 28, 1996

by David Heiller

Sometimes I’m not the greatest dad or husband. That rooster came home to roost last weekend.

Malika and David with MacKenzie: a hammock moment.

Our daughter, Malika, complained of stomach pains on Friday. She told her teacher, who called us and left a message on our answering machine. Then she went to the office and they called us and did the same thing. Then Mollie slept until her school bus came and brought her home.

I was home by then, and expected to see a sick kid limp off the bus. Quite the contrary. Mollie had brought a friend home with her, as she had pre-arranged to do, and her mysterious stomach pain seemed to have disappeared.

Like a good dad, I thought she had been faking it. Hey, it’s been known to happen.

Malika complained again that night before going to bed, and Cindy gave her a tylenol. Then she woke up in the middle of the night, and complained again, so we let her sleep on the couch.

When day broke, Malika still had her pain, so Cindy took her to the emergency room at about 7:30 a.m. “Maybe it’s her appendix,” she said.

“No way, it’s not her appendix,” I said. It’s never the appendix.”

They did a few tests, and thought maybe it could be her appendix. They told Cindy to keep an eye on Malika and let them know if the pain got worse.

Ms. Malika, earlier that winter.

It did get worse. She laid on the couch and slept and watched TV all morning and into the afternoon. And this was with a friend around, a friend that is always on the go, playing, exploring, building forts. Mollie didn’t play with her friend, didn’t help us plant seeds, didn’t eat tuna fish sandwiches. She was in a lot of pain. So Cindy took her back to the doctor at about 2 p.m.

Old skeptical Dave still wasn’t convinced. Maybe a cast iron skillet up side the head would have helped, but Cindy was too busy with Mollie for that.

So I took Malika’s friend home, and stopped on the way back to visit with some friends, and when I finally rolled home an hour later, our son met me at the door with the news that Malika had to have her appendix out and Mom was trying to call me and where the heck was I anyway and I’d better call Mom at the hospital right away.

The dog house outside was empty, and I felt like crawling into it.

But I faced the executioner and called Cindy and hustled to Moose Lake and we took Malika to St. Luke’s in Duluth where a doctor tapped and prodded and listened with his stethoscope and even then I thought he was going to say it was something else.

He proclaimed that Malika had a bad appendix. An hour later Malika had her appendix removed. It had a bad infection in it.

Daddy had other opportunities to rescue Malika, 
such as digging her out of a bottomless frostboil.

Malika stayed at St. Luke’s until Monday. She has to stay home from school for a week. She’ll recover fine. It’s just an appendix, for crying out loud.

There I go again.

I’m making light of it here, but I blew it, and maybe I’ll recover from my hands off approach to illness too. Maybe I’m making a sexist generalization, or trying to share my guilt, but I think we dads are a bit more removed from our kids’ and spouses’ ailments than we should be, and don’t always take them seriously. We don’t even take our own illnesses seriously.

(Dads, help me out! Write a lot of letters to the editor confirming that I’m not the only Idiot Father in Minnesota.)

When someone gets sick around our house, I usually say, “Why don’t you take a walk, and get some fresh air? That always helps me.”

If Cindy hadn’t been around, I probably would have made Mollie walk to the culvert and back. I would have waited a lot longer before taking Malika to the doctor. Maybe too long, which could have resulted in a ruptured appendix, which could have led to fertility problems and other infections.

We’re never too old to learn. I’m living proof of that.

Scratching away at raising a family ~ March 31, 1988

 David Heiller

Miss Emma missed her calling when she decided not to be a mother.

Actually, it was our decision, not Miss Emma’s. We drove her to the vet’s, while she sat howling in a cardboard box. Cats don’t like to be neutered, much less spayed. Not any more than people do. I should know, but that’s a subject for a future column. Far in the future.

Miss Emma is the seventh in a long line of cats for us. There was Carson, then Garrison, then Sadie, then Chauncey, Hickory, and Murphy. Dogs killed two, an owl carried Murphy off one spring night, the others died by disease and attrition.

Miss Emma has lasted the longest. We got her free from Silver and Bernice Anderson of Sturgeon Lake in the spring of 1983, when she was about four months old.

Malika and Miss Emma

I always have felt sad in a sentimental way that Miss Emma couldn’t have kittens. There were always kittens at home when I was growing up. The matriarch cat in our house, Cindy, gave birth like clockwork twice a year to a litter of kittens, for about 10 years straight. There was something special about watching Cindy nurse her young, how they would nuzzle into her stomach, kneading with their paws while they sucked. Cindy would lick them clean while they nursed, then serve as wrestler and referee after they finished and started to play.

Miss Emma missed out on all that, until Malika was born in June of 1985. They seemed to like each other from the time Mollie came home from the hospital. There’s a picture on our living room wall of Malika in her basket sleeping, at age three months, with Miss Emma curled on the blanket by her feet.

We worried about it at first, Cindy and I did (Cindy my wife, not Cindy the cat). Malika loved Miss Emma from the start, but she showed that love by grabbing fistfuls of fur, or that twitching tail. But Miss Emma did not scratch or bite back. She gritted her teeth, and endured the torture, and when she could endure no longer, she would simply pull away and hide.

Hanging out:  Miss Emma and Malika in the maple tree.

When Malika started to crawl. Miss Emma sensed the time had come to start training her “daughter.” I still remember the day the training began. Cindy’s mother happened to be visiting us. Mollie had grabbed Miss Emma’s tail, and wouldn’t let go. They sat locked on the living room floor. We heard Miss Emma give a low growl. We warned Mollie, “You better let go now.” Miss Emma reached around quicker than a wink and scratched Malika’s hand. Just a tiny scratch, but Mollie seemed mortally wounded. She let go of the tail and started howling herself.

Cindy and I stood frozen, waiting for a sign from Grandma Olson. Grandma didn’t disappoint us. “That’ll teach you to hurt the kitty,” she told Mollie.

Cindy and I let out our breath at the same time.

Since that day, Miss Emma has taught Malika how to be nice to cats. We’ve tried to help in our cumbersome, wordy way. “Pet her like this,” we showed her, stroking Miss Emma slowly across the back.

Malika would try it for a few pets, but soon the twitching tail was too much, and the petting turned to pounding. Miss Emma would not simply jump up and run, nor would she gouge a deep scratch. She would uncurl her claws from their padding, and give a little pat. Malika would cry, “Semma scratched me.” But the pounding would stop, and the petting would begin again.

Miss Emma and her wood box.

Now, Miss Emma and Malika are almost inseparable, though like all good relationships, it’s the love-hate variety. Last Saturday morning, Miss Emma sat in the bottom of our empty wood box in the kitchen. Malika spied her in there, and crawled inside.

“Semma and I are best buddies,” she said.

But Tuesday night, Malika had a complaint. “Semma’s going to scratch me again, and Momma called the doctor,” she stated after her nightly trip to the potty.

That would be news to Momma, who was at her aerobics class.

“She scratched me right on my tummy.”

“Why?” I asked.

“Because we going to get mad at her.”

“Why did she scratch you?” I repeated.

“Because like that,” Mollie answered, swiping at her tummy.

“Not where. Why? What were you doing?”

“Because I was going to play right behind him, and I was going to call the doctor, and I was going to get Semma out of my bed, and I’m gonna scratch Semma.”

“You can’t scratch her.”

“I’m too bad.”

Somewhere in that twisted dialogue lay a confession and an apology. Once again Miss Emma had taught her daughter a lesson.

The lessons will continue. Miss Emma will again take her place at the foot of Mollie’s bed. Someday she won’t have to worry about her tortured tail and pinched fur. She’ll be able to pull in her claws and sleep peacefully, next to a daughter she can be proud of.

Isn’t that every mother’s dream?

Those invincible days of yore ~ March 29, 2006

David Heiller

Editor's note: This column was written after he presented the readers of the Caledonia Argus the long article he wrote for Backpacker Magazine.

I’m back to the present and the land of the living, after a four-week hiatus down memory lane.

A lot of people commented on my adventure in the mountains 33 years ago, which I reprinted in this space.

Some final thoughts: I was having lunch last week with a couple of colleagues. One man asked me how I could not have known about the possibility of bad weather, a snow storm.

David and the kids on our 1998 backpacking trip to Rocky Mountain National Park.

I stammered a bit; and the other man, a backpacker himself, said it simply: “We’re flatlanders.”

That was part of it. It’s one thing to be in a snowstorm in Houston County. Granted, it’s not flat here by North Dakota definitions. But there aren’t many snow storms in which a healthy 20-year-old man could not wade and tromp through to get help in rural Caledonia.

The mountains were another world. I had climbed 6,500 feet in elevation and hiked 30 miles. Some of that was very steep. It was physically impossible for a person to walk through that country after three feet of snow without snowshoes, which I didn’t have.

“And I was 20,” I said. “I was invincible.” Remember those days? It was a long time ago, but there was a time when I felt there was no physical task, within reason, that I couldn’t accomplish. I bet a lot of people feel the same way.

“Why didn’t you just turn around and go back the way you came?” my colleague asked. There again, I had to admit that I could not physically do it. The trail was obliterated and steep. The best way out was the other side of the mountain.

David, in the hospital after his rescue.

The other comment I have received was how lucky I was to survive. That’s true. The luck extended beyond Yosemite National Park. I had hitchhiked from Brownsville to Oregon, then down the West Coast to San Francisco, then east to Yosemite, That’s not exactly a safe thing to do either.

In fact, that was the fear that crept into the hearts of my mother and other family members. They hadn’t heard from me in a month. I had written to Mom from the park the day before my final adventure, telling her I would soon be hitchhiking to Phoenix to spend Thanksgiving with my brother Glenn and his family. When Thanksgiving came and went, she feared the worst.

I’ll never forget the phone call I made home from the hospital bed after I was rescued. She probably remembers it too, although we don’t talk about it. We’re good Germans!

I’ll never forget my mountain experience either. “You definitely cheated death.” my brother, Danny, wrote to me recently. That’s not something you take lightly.

Grandmas can’t sleep where angels tread ~ March 19, 1987

By David Heiller

Our son, Noah, and his great-grandma Schnick have always had a special relationship. He took a shine to her from the first time he could first crawl onto her lap.

When we visit her and Grandma Heiller (my mother), Noah spends most of the day upstairs with Grandma Schnick. He shows off his block building skills, or talks non-stop about lions. Adventures come racing from his mouth faster than a three-year-old brain can process. Often Grandma will turn to me and ask, “What in the world is he talking about?”

Noah and his Grandma Schnick

“Your guess is as good as mine,” I answer.

At night, he crawls into Grandma Schnick’s soft bed and sleeps by her side. Grandma has a lot of confidence in Noah to allow this. She knows she is playing Russian roulette with his bladder, which half the time can give a sleeping partner a rather rude awakening.

Grandma Schnick doesn’t play favorites with her great grandchildren. At age 91, she knows better than that. She doesn’t love any one less. But she does have a special place for Noah. You see it in the way she talks with him, reads to him, even just sits and listens and watches as he talks and plays.

At least, that is until this past weekend. He had been walking on water, but now it may have frozen to thin ice. It started Saturday night, at the supper table. Grandma Heiller had fried up fresh rainbow trout, along with potatoes, peas and salad. Noah wouldn’t look at his plate. Instead, he started sliding off the front of his chair.

“You take at least one bite of everything,” Cindy said. “Or you don’t leave the table.”

“Yeah, but I don’t want to,” Noah said, caught in mid-slide off his chair.

“Don’t whine,” I said. “One bite or sit still.”

“Yeah, but I have to play,” Noah answered, arching further down.

“You’ll go in the bedroom if you get off that chair,” Cindy said.

“No I won’t!” Noah said, completing his slide off the chair.

Cindy swept him off the floor as he crawled out from under the table, and dropped him on the bed in the adjoining room. She shut the door behind her.

Grandma had watched the episode without a word. “Well, that’s not the Noah I know,” she said.

Noah was a little older for this visit,
things went much better.

Noah finally quieted down from crying in the bedroom, and rejoined us at the supper table, as he always does when this happens. But Noah’s angel wings had lost a few feathers in Grandma’s eyes.

The next morning, Cindy and I woke up at 6:30, which is quite late for us. It is late for Noah too, as Grandma found out. The good news was she woke up in a dry bed. The bad news was she woke up at 4:30 in the morning. That’s when Noah had decided to talk about those lions of his. He did a fair imitation of them too, growling under the covers, clawing and crawling into a den at the foot of the bed.

Grandma greeted us at the living room as we said our good mornings. “How did you sleep,” I asked.

“Fine,” Grandma answered, looking at me through eyes ringed with sleepless circles that told otherwise.

Those angel feathers had been clipped even shorter. I doubt if Noah could have flown at that point. But he came crashing to the ground an hour later. He had been complaining about his shirt, which had tiny dinosaurs on the front. He would have complained if you had offered him ice cream—4:30 risings do that to kids.

I offered to put a vest on over the dinosaurs. “I don’t like this damn shirt,” Noah said.

Grandma sat up straight in her chair.

“Noah, we don’t talk like that, that’s not nice,” I said. “I don’t know where he picked that up,” I said to Grandma.

Grandma didn’t dignify that statement with an answer.

It could have been a worse four letter word, but Noah’s got plenty of time to pick those up. Meanwhile, his shocker at the breakfast table plucked what few angel feathers had remained clean out. He was wingless.

As we strapped ourselves into the car later Sunday morning, for our trip home, the two Grandmas stood on the porch and waved goodbye. They leaned against each other for support. (Malika had slept with Grandma Heiller, and had complained about her imaginary “owies” for two hours that pre-dawn morning too. But that’s another story.)

We waved goodbye, and they smiled and waved too. They were smiles of happiness, but also of relief and fatigue.

“Those were two of the best night’s sleep of my life,” Cindy said as we drove off.

“Yeah,” I agreed. “We’ve really got to come visit them more often.”

“Yeah, but I’d like to stay with Grandma Schnick and Grandma Heiller all alone,” Noah added.

I think we’ll wait a while before we return. At least until they catch up on their sleep.

Noah beats all ~ March 1, 1984

David Heiller

The flu knocked me out for most of last week. I missed three days of work, as I sat delirious and fevered in the big chair by the woodstove at home.

Cindy, my wife, gave the flu to me (not intentionally—no one hates me that much). We suffered together, while Noah had his run of the house. Noah is our eight and a half month old son.

Noah setting Binti straight.

Ask Binti, our 70 pound dog, about Noah’s supremacy. She’ll swallow and try to crawl under the woodstove. Noah wrestled Binti into a black mop last week, while Cindy and I watched helplessly, calling encouragement to the faithful dog from our perches on the furniture.

Noah rolled on Binti, climbed on Binti, rode Binti, and hung onto Binti’s ears as if they were reins. Binti grunted, groaned, licked, and eventually struggled to her feet and went outside.

Noah had his turn at us too. He woke up in the middle of the night several nights, and cried till we brought him into bed with us. Is there anything more like heaven for an eight and a half month old? You could have sworn it was 10 in the morning by how happy Noah was to be with Mom and Dad in bed. He sat up and laughed. Turn to face him, and he played with your face like putty. Turn away from him, and your back was a giant drum, to be pounded till you rolled over and the process began anew.

David, Noah, Binti and Miss Emma. Noah is about to 
begin drumming one of those expensive toys.

Drumming, I learned last week as I suffered and watched, is Noah’s calling. He pounds everything. All those expensive Fisher-Price toys, that click and ring and cost a lot of money, are reduced to nothing more than elaborate drums. That expensive electronic scale that I bought Cindy for Valentine’s Day, it’s nothing more than a perfect drum for Noah. The highchair tray, the cat, the stereo cabinet, all are perfect drums. There is nothing our house that is drum proof, including us.

Noah may also be a wrestler, I decided last week. I first got the idea after watching him rake Binti over the coals. Then I learned the hard way, as he showed me his latest moves in diaper changing.

I wrestled in high school, so I know a bit about the sport. In fact, I was a fairly good wrestler. But despite my 160 pound advantage, Noah can beat me, when it comes changing time. 

His strongest move (actually his only move) is escaping. As I get the diaper under him, he rolls to his left, and grabs the edge of the changing table, and pulls himself upright, sitting and grinning. As I try to bulldog him back onto his back, the diaper gets twisted up. As I straighten the diaper, Noah rolls to his left and grabs the edge of the changing table. It’s a no-win situation, for me, till I move Noah onto the floor, where there is no edge grab. Then my chances are at least 50-50.

Well, maybe I was just weak from the flu last week—maybe that’s why Noah won. But I have a feeling it’s not.

Editor's note: I remember this so clearly. I was stricken with influenza first, and spent two days alone with Noah while barely functional. I have to admit it: I was relieved when David got it too, and had to stay home.