Behind the Lines: by David Heiller

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 i...

David Heiller Monday night. Already I could feel the butterflies in my stomach, thinking about the first day of school. Not my first day. Thank goodness, those are done. No, I was worrying about my son. I was thinking about Wednesday morning at 7:20, when he would climb onto Dave Nyrud’s bus and disappear down the gravel road toward Willow River. The very first of 13 first-day-of-school photos Do people remember their first day at school? I remember mine. My mom took me by the hand, a block up Main Street to the red brick building. Mrs. Escar was waiting, grandmotherly smile, wearing a shiny green dress with little seahorses on it. Mom had her first competition. The next day, I stood ready for Mom to take me to school again, but she inform­ed me that I would have to walk all by myself. I wonder how she felt as I trudged off at the heels of my seven brothers and sisters. Now I know. Noah stood in the driveway last Wednesday morning, not saying much, just waiting patiently....

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 mic...

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'...

Daivd Heiller Thunder rumbled non-stop high above our home on Monday evening, August 14. The tense and humid day was turning ugly. Cindy had left for Cloquet to pick up Mollie from a church retreat. I stayed home to work on the computer for the newspaper. Noah was with me. I like to be home when bad weather visits. I was worried about Cindy in the car. Enjoying our yard in the spring, before the storm beat everything up. It seemed like hours. It was probably about 10 minutes. Then when the hail had finished, the rain came down in sheets. After it stopped, I walked through the yard. All the trees were standing. That was a relief. But their branches were shredded and gaunt. Everything — the ground, the deck, the hammock, the trampoline — was covered with leaves and branches that had been torn off by the hail. A window on the north side of the house was broken. The rain gauge was broken. The garden was devastated: corn flattened, squash torn up, tomatoes punctured. The pl...

David Heiller The Great Debate is never far from the surface at our house. It’s a consequence of having two children two years apart. Throw in the fact that they are of different gender and opposite personalities, and some powerful dramas can ensue. Oh, those kids! Negotiation is one aspect of The Great Debate. A typical Negotiation played out last Sunday afternoon in the kitchen. “Noah, I’d like you to clean the porches,” I told my son, age 18. Just then my daughter walked into the house. I had to think fast. You can’t give one kid a job while the other looks on. “Mollie, can you empty the dishwasher?” I asked my daughter, Malika, age 16. It wasn’t really a question, and she knew it. Mollie started an immediate, barely audible protest. Noah’s radar went up. “Mollie do you want to switch with me?” he asked her. “OK,” Mollie replied, and the deal was done. Mollie whipped through the two porches, straightening shoes, sweeping the floor, giving the rugs the ...