An early hint of spring ~ February 16, 2003

David Heiller

I couldn’t quite believe it when I stepped onto the deck on Saturday morning.

It was like seeing an old friend in a crowd. Wow, Hello. How are you!

I shook the rug over the top of the railing, then draped it there to freshen it up. And I draped myself there too, leaning back, eyes closed.

The sun felt warm, the breeze off the river just soft and fresh enough to bring a fleeting thought to mind.

Spring.

We all receive that first hint of spring in different ways, but mine is sure-fire. I walked into the house, grabbed my fiddle, and returned to my spot. The fiddle almost played itself, first a familiar waltz, then a new tune, one that escapes me as I write this a day later, but one that had the new season as its theme.

David and his fiddle

A little later Cindy and I took a walk to the old Oesterle farm across the road. It’s one of our favorite walks. The ground was still hard from a night in the high twenties. But the snow was patchy enough for us to wear regular shoes and not our boots. Three weeks earlier we were snowshoeing on this fine path. But Saturday, well, once again it felt like spring. The dogs bounded ahead, then Rosie took a side trip into the high grass and disappeared the way dachshunds like to do.

We called for her a few times, then kept walking. No dog was going to ruin this spring walk, down to the white pines, past the old wind mill, then around the corn field that Duane so graciously left standing for the deer and turkeys.

Then back home, basking in the sun and wind and a carefree Saturday morning. Rosie met us in the driveway, tail whirling like a helicopter. “Weren’t you worried, weren’t you worried?” she seemed to ask.

“Νah,” we answered silently. “It’s spring, what is there to worry about?”

It wasn’t long after that that the spell was broken. Cindy got dressed for work; I donned my camera gear and headed off to a wrestling tournament. February and reality had returned.

Still, it’s fun to take those teasing doses of spring when they hit. The cardinal calls that seem to have new energy. The eagle leaving his nest on Hanke’s hill. The coyotes yipping across the road. The broadwing hawk crying out with freedom that puts out paltry politics to shame.

And the valley below. Wow, what a sight. The south face is totally bare of snow. Then there is a line drawn like the fine brush of a Sara Lubinski painting, and the north face is covered with snow. Nature is creeping along with spring in tow, and the hills aren’t lying. Can it be long until Steve Serres is out there searching for morels?

Farming: “Tricks of the Trade” ~ February 28, 1985

David Heiller

A lot of thoughts come to mind when I try to pin down my favorite farm story. There was the time my cousin, Donise, sat on a bumblebee. It stung her in a rather awkward spot, and swelled up like a plum. Once the pain stopped and the tears dried, she proudly showed her badge of courage to everyone around. She was about 10 years old at the time.

Haying in North Dakota. A Schnick family photo.

Another memory is when my Uncle Donny tricked me. (I should say one of the many times when he tricked me.) We were pulling a hay wagon down from a hay field on the ridge above his valley farm. Donny had two iron wedges that he would put in front of the steel-rimmed wagon wheels. This would help slow the wagon as we crawled down the steep hill, tractor in low gear and me hanging for dear life on top of five layers of hay bales.

0ne time, when we got to the bottom of the hill safely, Donny backed the wagon off the wedges, and ran his hand over the smooth wedge, “Gee `this is the smoothest thing you can imagine, he said, looking at me with a smile.

Oh, pinball.

“Yeah, lemme see,” I said, and ran my hand over the steel. Ouch! That steel wasn’t only smooth; it was red hot, after grinding against a steel rim for a mile. Donny laughed. His hand had stroked air, not steel. Eleven-year-old boys don’t notice such details.

Still another story took place over the course of an entire summer. I was helping my brother with haying on Donny’s farm. My brother wasn’t exactly overpaid, but he said he would pay me for my help. At age 10, I may have been more hindrance than help. But still I packed bales in the barn loft, probably the hottest and most miserable summer job you can ask for. Dust cakes, your face and neck. Bales scratch your forearms if you’re stupid enough to wear short-sleeved shirts.

Gloveless hands sprout blisters.

At the end of the summer, I timidly asked my brother for my wages. He gave me a 50-cent piece. My brother made the pharaohs of Egypt look like liberal Democrats. Still, I accepted the money, and announced that I would spend it carefully in the pinball machines at K-Mart in LaCrosse the following Saturday, when we all went to town.

That was too much for my brother. “If that’s the way you spend your summer money, forget it,” he said, and took back the half dollar. I cried. But I learned an important lesson: Don’t tell anyone, not even your brother, how you plan to invest your money.

Some laundry room tips OR Seeing red in the laundryroom~ February 15, 1996

David Heiller

Doing the laundry had always been my wife’s job in our house, until her mother’s illness took my wife away for days at a time and I had to become the laundry person. Temporarily.
It’s been an interesting test, and one that I haven’t passed with flying colors. If any color comes to mind, it is red.

Rut-Roh!

That’s lesson number one in Introduction to Laundry: Don’t put a red bandana in with a load of lights.
Cindy always has two piles of laundry going in the laundry room, one white and one dark.

Even when all the laundry is done and folded, she’ll put out a call for dirty laundry, and a pile is scraped together from the kids’ room and under the beds and from the bathroom, where a towel that looks perfectly clean to me has been used one too many times. Cindy can tell these things.

I have never believed in the merits of separating darks and whites. And since the laundry room also doubles as the sewing room and the pantry in our house, I thought I could eliminate that extra pile of clothes on the floor and just wash them all together.
But one day I found that one of my favorite white socks, with the elastic still intact and no holes in the heel, had turned pink. I had washed it with a red bandana.

The red bandanna always made
the ensemble complete!

I like red bandanas. I used to wear them as head bands when I was in college. Then I wore them around my neck like a cowboy when I worked with horses at Camp Courage one summer. They work as pot holders and towels and wash cloths on camping trips. And there’s nothing finer than taking a red bandana out of your back pocket with a flourish that would flag down A. J. Foyt, and giving your nose a good, healthy blow. That’s living.
But just this morning our daughter, commented on the fact that her underwear, which used to be white with little flowers on it, was now pink with little flowers on it.
And there’s her formerly white T-shirt and formerly blue jeans, both that special shade of pink. So now I separate the red bandanas from the whites.

Stains are another interesting problem. Cindy had a pair of white jeans that were draped over the laundry tuba while back. That usually means they are stained, and require some magical treatment that only Cindy knows. I looked for a stain, but didn’t find anything, just some mud that had spattered on the back of a 1eg. So I washed them (with the darks, of course).

Mud was always an issue living in the country.
Here, David is digging Malika out of the frost-boil that had she sunk into, 
and could not get out of. I believe that she was minus a boot when 
she emerged, but I digress.

Cindy noticed they were gone from the laundry tub a few days later. “You didn’t wash my pants, did you?” she asked in a dread-filled voice.

“Yeah, why?”

“They were stained.”

“Yeah, just on the legs.”

“That was mud,”

“Yeah, mud.” Had she been walking around in an oil spill? It was mud; good, honest Minnesota mud.

“You didn’t dry them, did you?” she asked in that same tone.

“Yeah, why?”

“You can’t dry in a stain. If you dry in a stain it’s very hard to get out.” She emphasized the words “very hard.”

Sure enough, Cindy found the clean, dry, pants, and there were the Mud Stains That Ate Manhattan.

Luckily I hadn’t ironed the jeans. If you wash, dry, and iron a stain, forget it. Nothing has been made to remove such a stain. We can put a man on the moon, but we can’t remove a stain that has been washed, dried, and ironed.

The moral of this story is to avoid mud puddles and red bandanas. Better yet, avoid the laundry room.

Editor’s note: I never did get that stain out, and I never purchased anything white again. And David never did laundry again…

Count your blessings and drive carefully ~ November 29, 2001

David Heiller

Joe hopped in the truck and headed to school on Monday morning. Α fine mist had fallen in the early morning hours, and was still sifting down. It had frozen on the windshield, and coated the roads with an almost invisible layer of ice.

"Joe" and a different red truck.

Joe wasn’t thinking about much as he drove to school. Not until he hit the icy patch. He figured he was going about 55 miles an hour when that happened and he was suddenly out of control. Is there anything more frightening than losing control of a vehicle? Joe didn’t think so. His heart felt like it was going to come out of his shirt.

It all happened so fast. The tail of the truck swung around and clipped the Hillbrand mailbox, sending it over two barbed wire fences like a Kent Hrbek homerun.

Then the truck shot to the other side of the road like a pinball. Α utility pole whizzed past, just inches away. Here comes the ditch! Α small tree shattered, its top falling on the hood. The truck plowed through grass and dirt and brush and came to an abrupt halt.

The whole incident took perhaps 10 seconds.

Joe struggled to get out, but he couldn’t open the driver’s door. It was held shut by brush. He crawled across the seat and opened the passenger’s door. He struggled through the trees to the highway. A friend drove by on her way to school. Joe flagged her down. She turned around and gave him a ride back home.

He entered the house, to the surprise of his parents, and said simply, “Call Rock’s.”

Joe’s dad called Rock’s Towing. Then they drove to the truck. They could barely see it; it was so far into the woods. But it was easy to see what had happened: the slick spot on the bridge, the rear end of the truck clipping the mailbox, then the furious crash into the ditch on the other side. When Joe’s dad saw how close his son had come to the utility pole, he almost unconsciously reached an arm across his son’s shoulders and gave him a squeeze. Another foot to the left, and Joe would have hit it head on, going very fast. There is no telling what would have happened to Joe. He had his seat belt on. Thank goodness he did that. But it still would have been ugly.

When Joe got back home, he gave his mother a hug, something he very seldom does. It started to sink in how lucky he had been.

Then Mitch Rock arrived with his big tow truck. Is there a more welcome sight to a stranded motorist than a tow truck driver? Mitch hooked a cable to the truck’s bumper. Joe’s dad cut the broken tree off at the ground with a chainsaw. The balsam tree was partially rotten. That’s why it had sheared off so easily, even though it was seven inches in diameter. He also cut away some of the brush that pushed against the truck. Then Mitch winched and pulled the truck out of the ditch. Amazingly, Joe’s dad could drive the truck home. It was hardly hurt. Joe took a different car to school, and his mom and dad proceeded to work.

That was it. An hour’s delay and an exciting story to tell for the price of a $65 towing fee.

"Joe" and his grateful family.

Well, not quite. Everybody in Joe’s family counted their lucky stars that day. They said a few prayers too. What if Joe had hit that telephone pale head-on going 50 miles an hour? What if that balsam tree had been strong and healthy? It wouldn’t have given in like that. What if someone had been coming from the other direction when the truck had skidded into the other lane?

I know Joe’s family well. I know Joe as well as I know myself, and I know his dad even better. I love Joe’s mom. I am very thankful for them all. For us. Not everybody is this lucky.

It’s that time of year, folks. You might be ready for winter. The hose might be put away, the firewood stacked, the snow blower tuned up. All those other chores might be done, and you are proud of that.

Do one more thing. Slow down. Drive carefully this winter. And count your blessings.