Behind the Lines: by David Heiller

David Heiller The bees were first to welcome me home from vacation last week. They were buzzing so loudly on Thursday morning that I could hear them from 30 yards away. The air around one hive was a blizzard of bees. They were swarming; half the hive was following the queen in search of a new home. Jeez, leave for a week and a queen gets upset at you. The nerve! One angry chap even stung me by my left eye, which swelled shut long enough for Cindy to take this photo. The standing head for David's column looked a little different that week. An hour later, I returned to the hive. All was quiet again. I walked through the field and spotted a ball of bees hanging from the limb of a willow tree. That’s where the queen had landed to get her bearings. What a sight. There’s nothing as exciting as watching a swarm of bees, 40,000 strong, the size of your thigh, all huddled on top of one another, shimmering, humming, moving as one. (It’s also exciting to a penny-pinching German ...

David Heiller “Where the @#%* is the car?’’ A young woman growled that question as we made our way through the crowd at Pettibone Park on the Fourth of July. She had a couple kids in tow. My daughter, Malika, and I hurried past her. “Did you hear that?” Malika asked? “How could she talk like that in front of her kids?” I shook my head in the darkness. We had just watched some spectacular fireworks, but hearing that little cherry bomb of a verbal one took a little of the fun away. That lady had said a very serious swear word, at least in my mind. You can probably guess the word. It’s definitely not one you would expect to hear a mother use around her kids, But it seems like that is changing, that people are swearing more in public. I mentioned that to Malika. She told me about a group of people she had served at her job as a bartender a few days earlier. A group of people who swore like the proverbial longshoremen and they had their kids in tow. She was shocked and a...

David Heiller The Weather Woman on channel 10 was finishing her Saturday night report, while Cindy and I sat exhausted on the couch, half-watching, half-sleeping. Nothing could have got our attention except the words that Rhonda Grussendorf said next: “and there’s a chance of frost in the low-lying areas.” “Oh no, frost,” I groaned. Murphy’s Law, 14- C: The Night After You Plant Tomatoes, Frost Will Come. Collin working on the peas in a later  version of the Garden of Dreams...  because for us, they were ALL Gardens of Dreams. I looked at the outdoor thermometer: 52 degrees. “What do you think?” I asked Cindy. Last year we had a killing frost on June 10, and here it was only June 3. But the thought of covering tomatoes on Saturday night? Expletive deleted. “We can spray them with water in the morning before the sun hits them, that’s supposed to take care of frost damage,” Cindy said. She always says that on nights when frost may come. We were asleep...

David Heiller Saturday night, May 11, was a good night for mystery and suspense. Rain was falling, which helps any story lacking suspense, from Hill Street to Hemingway. The city of Askov lay quiet under the steady rain, and Cliff and Wilma Krogstad lay quiet in their bed as the rain pounded the roof. Cliff and Wilma don’t usually think about mystery and suspense at three in the morning, rain or no rain: They are usually too busy sleeping. But on May 11, Cliff heard a strange noise, and the mystery began. “Cliff and I were sleeping, and all of a sudden, we heard someone come in,” Wilma recalls. “We thought it was our son, going to bed. Then we heard him get up again.” Cliff stumbled bleary-eyed out of bed to investigate. He came back wide awake. “Boy mother, there’s a strange woman in the house,” Cliff said. “You should see the room, it’s a mess.” Mystery in Askov... You should have seen the woman. She was, ah, she didn’t have, well, she seemed to be lacking, um — t...

David Heiller It’s funny how we can get too much of a good thing. I’m thinking of the rain that has fallen lately. It started on Wednesday night, May 19, and really hasn’t stopped since then, and I’m writing on Sunday night, May 23. John's model? It’s getting to the point where John Holzwarth is sketching out plans for an ark, and Pastor Tony Fink is rounding up pairs of animals on the sly. I know, we needed the rain, the water table is low, people are starving in China. But enough is enough. I could predict it was coming though, and I’ll take a little credit (or blame). Here’s my theory. One: I planted grass seed on Wednesday afternoon, a lot of grass seed, $64 worth, all around the yard and over the geo-thermal field. It was a big project, aided I must add by my good neighbor Duane Thomford, who bladed and dragged the acre of ground just right. So after the grass seed and fertilizer were all scattered carefully in place, using the Farmers Co-op handy-dandy s...

David Heiller Our family had a scare last Friday evening. Our daughter, Malika, was jumping on our trampoline. It’s the round kind that is sold at stores like Sam’s. I was working in the garage when I heard Mollie calling for me. I went to the trampoline, where she was lying. She could barely move. She said she had tried to do a knee flip and had hurt her neck. I helped her off the trampoline and walked her to her bed. She walked stiffly. Her neck hurt so bad that she wanted to go to bed at 8 on a Friday night. That worried me. I went back outside. My wife, Cindy, was on her way home from Minneapolis, so I was on my own. My mind was working on a couple things. One thing was the fact that I tend not to take injuries seriously. Like last December when Mollie chipped a bone in her ankle while skating. Or when she had an appendicitis a month ago. So I was thinking, “Maybe she isn’t really hurt. But maybe she is.” The second thing was WHERE she was hurt. A neck injury while ...

David Heiller We arrived in Laurel Springs at about 6:30 Wednesday night. Our handy-dandy guide book said there were three bed and breakfasts there. Any town with three B-and-B’s must be wo rt h a visit, Cindy reasoned. She is usually right about these things, and this time was no exception. The first thing we noticed about Laurel Springs was that there was no Laurel Springs. We drove down the road for three miles, in the gathering darkness, until I looked at the map and realized that Laurel Springs was two miles behind us. David in North Carolina, 1999. We turned around (it wasn’t the first time, nor the last) and realized that the crossroads of Highways 113 and 88 was pretty much Laurel Springs. Or so we thought. We pulled into the yard of a big farm house, which happened to be a bed and breakfast, and asked if they had a room. You don’t just drop into a B & B at 6:30 p.m. and ask for a bed. It’s not the same as going to the Bronco Motel. And the B and B didn’t ...

David Heiller The bees are in the mail. Weaver Apiaries in Navasota, Texas, shipped them out on Monday. Later this week the phone will ring and postmaster Kathy Weulander will say in a voice that is not quite trembling, “Hi, Dave, your bees are here, would you come and get them, PLEASE!” This is how bees are mailed. David always got an  EARLY morning call when they arrived. Sometimes the call came the night before, from the mail sorting center. Everyone seems to get kind of nervous! The bees come in screened containers about the size and shape of a large shoe box. They look like a giant, buzzing ball. Somewhere in the middle is their love and hope and future — their queen. Kathy doesn’t have to worry in the presence of queens like that. Even when some of the bees get out of their container. That’s because they could care less about Kathy Weulander and David Heiller. No, any escapees will cling to the side of that screened box, from Texas and Oklahoma to Missouri and...

David Heiller Ι walked out of the sauna Sunday night, a smile crossed my face. I was recalling our Christmas sauna, when my brother-in-law Randy, my nephew Collin, and I took a sauna. It’s one I’ll remember for a while. Randy asked Collin if he was going to roll in the snow. He said it with a tone of voice that raises a nine-year-οld’s dander. Α challenge. Collin took the bait. Collin ran out and did a quick roll onto the snow which lay thick on the ground. Then he ran back in as fast as a boy can move. He threw the challenge back at Dad, who followed his son, and Randy moved about as fast as a 37-year-old man can move. Then it was my turn. I hadn’t done that since my own kids were little. Malika and Cynthia, apres sauna. We loved our saunas. When I fl opped in the snow, I remembered why. There is nothing quite as shocking as cold snow on a hot body. It felt as if needles pricked my whole body. I ran hollering back into the sauna. The stove glowed red, bu...