Behind the Lines: by David Heiller

David Heiller Dear Grandma: We were sitting on the bed watching a Charlie Brown Christmas Thursday night. It’s a good show, with good lessons about people and Christmas. Charlie Brown can’t find the true meaning of Christmas. For some strange reason he gets depressed around Christmas time. He thinks he should be happy, but he isn’t. He thinks he doesn’t have any friends. Everyone puts him down. There’s commercialism all around. The kids and I were soaking all this up, saying “Yeah, you’re right” to ourselves. I thought of Mollie, who had taken a verbal beating from a girl on her bus. I thought of the Tickle Me Elmo doll, which some fine folks are selling for up to   $500. People can be ugly. Then Cindy came into the room and asked me to fix the toilet paper dispenser. It had come off the wall, screws and all. A toilet paper dispenser doesn’t just fall off a wall. Someone had to have pulled it off, probably by accident. “Who did it?” I asked. Neith...

David Heiller Dear Grandma, How are you doing? I thought of you last Wednesday, when I watched a downy woodpecker attack the suet in one of the bird feeders. It was in the midst of a respectable snow storm, and the birds were going crazy at the feeders: nuthatches, chickadees, sparrows, and Cindy’s favorite, a tufted titmouse. Tufted titmouse I remember how you used to like feeding the birds, and would concoct some fancy meals for them with melted suet and peanut butter poured into half a grapefruit peeling. Something like that. It seemed like a lot of unnecessary work to me, but I liked how much joy it gave you to cook it all up, carry it to the clothesline and hang it up with strings. Then we’d watch the birds gobble it up, just like that downy did last Wednesday afternoon. Snow really brings on feelings of Christmas, doesn’t it? I know the holiday is a lot more than that, we mustn’t forget it, but I like how snow slows things down a bit, makes us stop and think...

David Heiller “Christmas does not end on December 25—boom, Christmas is over. Christmas ends on January first.” Cindy sits in the next room, reading a magazine in the warmth of a wood stove and Christmas tree lights. Those are her words, spoken to a cynic with writer’s block in the kitchen. The writer can’t think of anything to write about, and it’s Christmas, for goodness sake. All he can do is sip at his cup of tea and devour a plate of cookies that he begged off his wife. He begged her not to give them to the kids’ grandparents, not all of them. Peanut-butter-on Ritz­crackers-dίpped-ίn-melted-almond-bark cookies. Give Grandma and Grandpa an embroidered hanky and shaving cream like when we were kids. Save the cookies for home. Cookies. The man at the typewriter sits forward now, the blur lifting from his eyes like mist on a river in the winter. Cookies, he thinks as he reaches for another hunk of almond bark cr...

David Heiller One sign of Christmas hit me at work on Monday, December 8. Hazel had brought peppernuts to work for our coffee break. I said, “You know it’s Christmas when Hazel brings peppernuts to work.” Peppernuts are like miniature gingersnap cookies. They are about the size of a nickel. They must be hard to make, because they are so small. Yet Hazel makes them by the hundreds every Christmas. I don’t want to go overboard describing Hazel’s peppe rn uts. Α man could get in trouble doing that. Besides, Hazel is still mad at me for going overboard about her in last week’s column, when I wrote about what a nice sewing lady she is. But you haven ’t really lived till you’ve tossed a fist full of Hazel’s peppernuts into your mouth and washed them down with a cup of coffee. Wow. My wife, Cindy, makes a cookie that always reminds me of Christmas too. They are chocolate cookies, chewy and soft, with just the right amount of chocolate. I still make Grandma Schnick's ch...

David Heiller The sound woke me out of a restless sleep early Monday morning. A big vehicle moving north on Hillside Road, going nice and slow, with a deep rumble and scrape. I had to smile. A snowplow. I followed the sound with my ears, then got up and looked out the bathroom window as it passed by the house. The ground was covered with white. Snow had been spitting down the night before, but I didn't have much faith in the effort. And in fact it wasn't a big snow, just a couple inches of wet stuff. A pre-plow walk in a wintry wonderland. But it's a start. Some readers might think I'm crazy to wish for snow. It's like wishing for bad luck or illness to some folks. But to me, winter doesn't seem like winter, nor Christmas like Christmas, without snow, Grandma's chocolate cookies don't taste quite right. The birds at the feeders don't seem as happy. The woods look bleak and gray. But add that white to the ground, ...

David Heiller Bring in the firewood fr om the woods, split stack it, and cover it. Α good job to do with y o ur son, although the son might not agree. All right, so maybe we weren't always ready for winter. No time to rake up the debris around the woodpile. Maybe later. Close up the greenhouse. It’s been open at both ends since last spring. Make a note to fix the broken pane. No time to do it now. Extract the honey fr om the 19 frames of honey comb that have been sitting in the sauna for a month. They contain 3-3/4 gallons of honey. Put the empty frames by the bee hives, for the bees to clean up. Nothing goes to waste with bees. But I get most of their honey. It’s good in a cup of tea every morning. Disconnect the hose from the house. Put all the hoses in the basement. How did I ever get this many hoses? Four of them. I’m a man who’s rich in hoses. Put the canoe paddle away, and the frog net too. They are lying by the pond. Mollie and I caught lots of frogs wit...

 David Heiller Before Cindy and I had children, we decided to get a puppy. We joked that it would be a good child-rearing test for us. (There’s a lot of truth to that joke.) We even named the dog Binti, which means “my daughter” in Arabic, which I spoke from my Peace Corps experience. Our first day with Binti. Binti was part of our family back then, nine years ago. She slept on the couch, or in our bed. When we visited relatives for holidays or weekends, she came along. We took her for walks every day, and played many games. One of the best games we played was on the big round bales of hay in the field near our rented farm house. Cindy and I would climb onto a bale, with Binti leaping to join us. Then we would race to the next bale, trying to keep ahead of the imaginary alligator. At first, Binti couldn’t catch us, but as the autumn progressed, we became alligator casserole nearly every night. When our real children started arriving, Binti’s life changed. She was...

David Heiller The hum from the bee hive rose to a roar as I lifted the lid off and puffed them with smoke. A stiff breeze swirled through the trees. Don’t work with bees on a windy day, the bee books say, but bees never could read very well. David and the hives . Besides, it was October 2, and I was about one month late in doing this job. Wind or no wind, I was going to take that honey. I squeezed the bellows of the smoker, sending more thick smoke down into the hive. The bees buzzed their disapproval, but most of them retreated into the hive. Smoke confuses them and sends them running to protect their queen. I couldn’t blame the bees for grumbling. They had worked hard for that extra box of honey. I lifted nine frames from the box on top. I used a hive tool, which is like a small crowbar, and a gripping tool to pry out each frame. They didn’t come out easily. In addition to weighing a couple pounds, each one was glued into place by bee glue, otherwise known as propo...