Behind the Lines: by David Heiller

David Heiller I couldn’t quite believe it when I stepped onto the deck on Saturday morning. It was like seeing an old fr iend 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 so ft and fr esh enough to bring a fl eeting thought to mind. Spring. We a ll 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 u...

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, ...

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 fl ying 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 ...

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. ...