The snow fort is waiting ~ December 28, 2000

David Heiller

Cοllin set out his plan shortly after arriving for Christmas last Friday. “What can we build?” he asked with a sly smile. He always asks that question when he comes for a visit, and he usually has an answer in mind before I can reply.

Α wagon. Stilts. A tree fort. These are past projects. What will it be this time, Uncle David?

“What are you thinking?” I asked back. Answering a question with a question is good strategy with an eight-year-old.

“How about a snow fort?” he asked with another smile.

I somehow knew that was coming. In fact, I had been thinking the same thing. But I let him lead the charge.

“Sure,” I said after a thoughtful look. “Where could we build it?”

“How about the ditch where Noah had his ice cave?”

“Good idea,” I answered. Funny, I had been thinking of that same spot.

“And maybe we could sleep in it,” he said.

“We could give it a try.” That was another thought that had been on my mind. Collin and I think alike, which is confusing to my wife. She thinks I am at least 14.

David and Collin after a fine day's
 project and Christmas dinner.

We looked over the spot and planned the attack. First, we shoveled the snow off the ground There was water under the snow in the bottom of the ditch, which is testimony to the insulating quality of snow. It wouldn’t take long for the slush to turn to ice. The temperature was four degrees below zero.

But we didn’t get cold. We were on a mission, and our important project was bigger than a little cold weather.

We made two sleeping benches, one on either side of the ditch. Collin wanted to lay down on his right away, but I told him that he had to let the snow harden for a couple hours.

For the roof, I suggested using some dimensional lumber from my lumber pile in the pole barn. We scrounged two 12-foot 2x6 boards and laid them on edge across the ditch. But that didn’t give us enough head room, so we went back for three more to lay on edge over these. I had to carry the boards, which were too heavy for Collin, who had somehow by now become my supervisor.

But the roof was still too low. So we went back for five more timbers. I carried them down and laid them flat on the other three. It looked plenty high enough.

Then we carried three tarps from the garage. We laid one on the benches. Two went over the top and ends of the fort. We shoveled snow on top and on one end. The tarps sagged with the weight of the snow, so I put another timber on top of the middle roof board and nailed it in place. Then I pulled the tarps tight and nailed a timber on top of each end roof board.

We carried three sleeping bags and two pads to the snow fort. I spread them on the benches. I told Collin he could use my bag, which is rated to minus 20 degrees. I would use the other two.

No matter what, David always told Collin 
stories in front of the fire before bed.
And there was ALWAYS a project.

For the rest of the afternoon and early evening, Collin was confident in his decision. He told everybody what we had planned, and he was met with no small amount of surprise, from his sister, from his cousins, from his parents, from my wife. You’re going to sleep outside with a weather forecast of minus 15 degrees? They thought we were crazy, although they didn’t come right out and say it.

But Collin grew quiet on the matter after supper, and during the boys’ turn in the sauna, with the temperature outside falling and the temperature inside pushing 150 degrees, his dad broke the news to me. Collin didn’t want to sleep in the snow fort.

That’s all right, I said to Collin. It’s not a problem. We’ll try it again some other time. My first instinct was to try to coax him into giving it the old college try. But I didn’t want to do that. I wanted him to lead the way, like he had done all day. You have to have your heart into winter camping for it to be a success.

I knew he felt bad for changing his mind, but I know it’s hard to camp out too close to home. The thought of a soft bed in the summer, or a warm bed in the winter, just 100 yards from the front door, is too hard to ignore.

And yes, a part of me was relieved when Collin changed his mind. It would have been fun to try, but it was fun to sleep inside too.

The day had been a great success anyway. “Process, not product,” as they say. The process had been great, for Collin and for me.

And the snow fort is still waiting...

2004 Christmas letter to Grandma ~ December 22, 2004

David Heiller

Dear Grandma,

The big week is here. The tree is up in its new spot in the new house. It’s small, only about five feet tall, so I put it on top of two bee boxes, and Cindy put a tree skirt around it. It looks great, like it belongs there, and it has three presents under it.

We went out and bought a tree this year, the first time for as long as we can remember. No fir trees on our property down here.

The first Christmas in the new home.

Christmas different this year, Grandma. The kids are gone now. When they were little, it seemed like they brought Christmas with them.

The concerts and school artwork and Sunday School pageants, even our trip to the woods to cut the tree were all a big part of the Christmas feeling.

I miss their excited talk about the presents under the tree. They would shake and rattle them, with an occasional word of warning from Cindy or me. “Careful with that one, Noah.” “I wouldn’t squeeze that one if I were you, Gol.”

They would count the presents too, to see if they each had the same number. They almost always did, thanks to Cindy, who could keep track of such things. I was lucky to know what they got. It’s a guy thing. Maybe Grandpa was the same way.

Cindy is still doing her part. The crèche has a new home on a table in the living room, and there is holly on the stair railing. And she has made hundreds of cookies, many of which have found a home with me. (She got up at 5 a.m. last Saturday to bake. That’s as sure a sign of Christmas as any.) Your chocolate cookies are still my favorite. It was nice to see your once-familiar handwriting on the recipe card on the counter.

But I am seeing and feeling the Christmas spirit, Grandma. It seems like every day for the past couple weeks, I have taken a picture or written a story about some good Christmas deed. Students gathering items for soldiers in Iraq. Groups donating to the food shelf. The huge Care & Share effort to distribute gifts to children in need in the county.

And in all those cases, I sense that old saying, ‘‘Tis Better To Give Than To Receive.” A lady at the Care & Share gathering told me something like that. She said this was good for the kids, but it was good for the community too. Good to give, to come together and help your neighbor. Even if you don’t know who you are helping. Maybe that makes it even better.

One of the recipients of a Care & Share gift came into the office last week to pick up a late donation. I sat in the other room, and could feel the woman’s excitement and gratitude from there. It was a new jacket for her teenage daughter. The price tag was still on it. It would fit perfectly!

The girl had never received a new jacket in her life, the mother said.

Jill was gracious as usual, and deferred the thanks to the whole group, which of course was true, although without the Jills of the world, there would be no Care and Share. But that’s the subject of another letter.

Anyway, the glow of good will in The Argus after the lady left lasted for about a day. You could almost feel it radiate like a heat lamp, or like the light from a Star in the East. It just sort of summed up Christmas for me.

So that’s it for this year, Grandma. I will try to track down an orange to eat on Christmas day, in honor of your favorite story about getting a Christmas orange every Christmas, how fresh and good it tasted. And I’ll have a few of your cookies too!

Love, David

Trying to solve a Christmas mystery ~ December 24, 1987

David Heiller

Gremlins Come Out at Christmas, the newspaper headline read. Santa’s Elves Discovered in Birch Creek Farmhouse?

DENHAM, [A.Ρ.] A set of strange occurrences have set the scientific world abuzz in this rural Minnesota community.

The David and Cindy Heiller household has been the site of several baffling mysteries that may be related to Old St. Nick himself.

Christmas tree ornaments have been found lying underneath the white spruce that they cut two weeks ago. The ornaments were hung several feet of the floor by the homeowners themselves. Several defy Newton’s Law to rest on the floor at the end of every day.

Look! A clue!

Tiny stars which Cindy Heiller stuck above a cut-out of a horse and sleigh on the kitchen window have been moved down into a crooked line above the sleigh. “They’re just sticky things you put on windows,” the baffled Cindy tried to explain. “They don’t move by themselves.”

The family’s nativity scene, with its ceramic Wise Men and cattle, has also been disrupted. The figures are often found arranged in different numeric patterns, shaped into a six or a seven, like something you might see on Sesame Street. Experts have yet to explain the significance of the numbers.

And Christmas cookies have been disappearing almost as fast as they come from the oven.

Several area Santa Clauses have been asked about the puzzle. Walter Price, speaking on behalf of the Willow River Santa, offered only “Ho-ho-ho.” Cindy Nelson, the personal secretary of the Askov Santa, put her finger aside her nose and disappeared up the Partridge Cafe chimney.

The Heiller family dog, Binti, has been seen drinking water from the Christmas tree stand, but couldn’t have lifted the ornaments from the tree, experts say. The family cat, Miss Emma, has been observed examining the nativity scene at close range, but doesn’t know her numbers, much less watch Sesame Street. She has been seen on the counter next to Christmas cookies, but is not big enough to carry them away.

 "Baby Tato"  and little Malika

David Heiller said he knew nothing, although he admitted to eating “one or two” cookies. When asked whether his weight had risen above 205 pounds, he pleaded the Fifth Amendment and swore at the First.

The Heillers’ two children, Noah and Malika, have been no help to authorities. Malika, a.k.a. Mollie, even added to the puzzle when she displayed two Wise men and the Virgin Mary in her purse. She admitted they came from the “King-Gum”. The figures were found next to a potato, a.k.a. Tato, which is now quite long in the tooth since it came from Nolan’s cellar a month ago. Asked to comment, the two-and-a-half year old  recited the words to Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star.

Noah, more eloquent at age four and a half, fell back on a line learned at a recent Sunday School pageant. “This is Joseph, this is Mary,” he said, making figures with his fingers. “Can I have another cookie, Daddy?”

The Pine County Sheriff’s Department is investigating the case.

“Don’t look for any answers soon, a sheriff’s spokesperson said, “Nobody panic. Just relax, enjoy your family. Sing a few Christmas carols. Dance around the tree if you’re Danish or so inclined.

“Oh yeah, have a Merry Christmas too.”

A 2000 Christmas letter to Grandma ~ December 21, 2000

David Heiller

Dear Grandma:

Christmas is here already, so I’ll give you my annual update and send it with Gabriel.

We are burning a lot of propane, Grandma. It’s been a cold January, and we are still in December. Snow too! A real winter, after three of the pretend variety.

We have a lot of birds at the feeders. We even had a starling the other day, a big galoot that had Noah asking, “Should I get the .22, Dad?” He still remembers how you hated starlings. Either that or it’s in his genes.

Noah was a bit older than this in 2000,
 but the idea is the same.

I put the kibosh on that. If I spread the table with food, then all the guests should be welcome. You would take exceptions with the starlings, if memory serves me right.

Mollie is going to sing at Church on Christmas Eve. That will make the service even more special, and it’s always special, the candlelight service, going way back to Brownsville with you by my side.

It feels like Christmas, and that can be both good and bad. I hope that’s not blasphemy. Christmas is never a smooth time for me. It’s a roller-coaster of joy and tension. Sometimes I feel like George Bailey. I want to kick over the presents and throw a book at the wisemen.

It can create some difficult moments between Cindy and me. We can clash over Christmas. It happened on Saturday. I’ll spare you the details. But we worked it out.

We always seem to break out of the fog of getting ready for Christmas. The decorations get put up. Cindy gets the house looking beautiful, full of lights and garlands and angles and can­dles, and I wonder how I ever could have objected to any of it. The presents get bought and wrapped. Company comes, and children. The wall fills up with cards from friends and relatives.

It’s a time of wonder, and a time of being thankful.

Kids wonder about the Santa guy. Adults wonder about this Jesus baby.

Husbands are thankful for their wives, for their wisdom and patience and skill and beauty. And vice versa.

We count our blessings this time of year too. I was talking to Don Benrud after church on Sunday. He had a bad illness this year. He almost died. He lost his hearing in one ear from it, and now has to live with a constant buzz in that ear, and problems with his equilibrium. But he told me with a smile that he really doesn’t have it bad at all. It’s nothing compared to what some people have to deal with. I could see that he meant it. He was counting his blessings, and it gave me courage to see his courage.

David with his Grandma Schnick and his sister, Lynette.
 He always missed them both.

One of my great blessings was having you for a grandma. You’ve been gone for 11 years now. But you are still alive in my heart, and I know you always will be.

How many kids are lucky enough to have their grandma live upstairs? That was the greatest gift of all. You were like a lantern in the window, always there with cribbage board and longhorn colby cheese. Always brimming with stories about the good old days. Yes, the time you got an orange for Christmas, when you were a little girl in Nebraska, and how sweet and good that orange tasted! Always full of love.

So it’s another Christmas, Grandma, another good one. Thanks for listening. You are still a part of it.

Love, David

Some early Christmas yearnings ~ November 30, 1989

David Heiller

Christmas is more than a day to most people. It is a season. It officially starts the day after Thanksgiving, though you wouldn’t guess it from the hucksters. Every year the shopping malls stretch their Santa Sales back and back, enough to make a Scrooge out of the happiest camper. Then Thanksgiving comes and the Christmas decorations look a little softer. A Christmas carol pops into your head.

It starts after the Thanksgiving feast, in the front yard, the family gathered for a football game in the snow. Glenn tries a 1962 block on me, rolling into the back of my knees from behind as I snap the ball. It works the first time, and Danny is sacked by the fierce pass rush of Duke, Glenn’s black lab. When Glenn tries it again, I sit on his head for five seconds. Glenn must think it’s five minutes, as he flails in the snow under my mashed potatoes and gravy. That will teach him to clip me.

Three Heiller's, Glenn, Fern, and Danny on
the day of the Thanksgiving Day game.

Danny has forgotten his gloves, so he tries to wear his wife’s dainty pair. They fit over four fingers. He smiles sheepishly and takes them off. “How are your hands?” I ask later. “Fine,” he says with a grin. They look red and raw, but he’s forgotten about the cold. A good football game will do that. And like all good football games, this one ends with darkness, and no one cares who won.

On Sunday, the kitchen fills with the aroma of turkey soup, as Cindy boils the carcass in a kettle on the stove. She adds carrots and onions, celery and thyme, bay and garlic, potatoes and homemade noodles, all roiling and rolling off the electric range, filling the house with a smell too rich to describe, one that can only be appreciated with a bowl and spoon in front of the Viking-Packer football game. It’s the kind of soup that makes you shrug when the Vikings blow another game.

Or maybe the Vikings make you shrug. Every Christmas season we get our hopes up as the Vikes rise high and fall flat. They can sure kick field goals. I suggest they revise their schedule for the next four games in hopes of scoring a touchdown: December 3 vs. Willow River Young Astronauts; Dec. 10 vs. Finlayson Elementary Chess Club; Dec. 17 vs. Bruno Elementary Just Say No Club; and Dec. 25 vs. A. B. Clausen and his Earthquakers.

Noah snuggles into a cold winters evening with Grace.

Snow gets us thinking about Christmas too. Our first real snowfall came on Monday, dumping half a dozen inches on Askov. It was a gentle snow at first, the kind that sticks to trees and cattails and makes you want to stay home or work outside. The kind that makes kids leave the house five minutes early to wait for the school bus and catch some flakes on their tongues. The kind that makes Art Christensen grab his grain shovel and clean off Elizabeth Berglund’s driveway. Art works slowly, soaking up winter’s first hello. You get the feeling that you couldn’t PAY Art to fly with the snowbirds to Arizona.

But the soft and quiet snow spell is broken as the day darkens. The wind steps up a notch, and suddenly you bend into it, hands in pockets, cap pulled low. You start thinking maybe Arizona isn’t so elite after all. December hasn’t even hit yet, for crying out loud, and January comes after that...

Those dark, dark winter evenings can be so cozy.

Back on the homestead Monday night, the snow is a mixed blessing. It covers up the roll of torn up toilet paper that Queen Ida dragged from the outhouse. But it also covers up the woodpile that didn’t quite get stacked and covered. Chunks of elm, snow still clinging bravely, gets carried inside and stacked behind the stove, where it will melt in time to be fed into the maw of the Fisher. At first the house doesn’t seem to notice, and we all put on sweaters and shiver. The kids huddle under an afghan on the couch and watch Square One, while Mom and Dad get supper going, moving constantly to stay warm. It’s already dark outside, at a quarter to five.

Then suddenly the stove humps its shoulder like Paul Horning, and you feel the heat start to radiate through the living room, into the kitchen where it mixes with leftover turkey soup, into the bathroom and upstairs to the cold floors and flannel sheets.

After supper, the kids shed the afghan and climb onto my lap, onto Cindy’s lap. We’re like tired animals nestling with our young. But are animals ever this content?

Outside, the wind blows cold under needles of starlight. The radio says it’s zero and heading for eight below. Who cares? It’s Christmas time.

The path to the old outhouse ~ December 2, 1993

David Heiller

We got a foot of snow last week,

And while it made the fields look sleek,

It drifted deep across our yard

And digging out was mighty hard.

David's beloved outhouse.
 It was all we had for many, many years.

I dug a path to the garage

And to the sauna I dislodged

About a half a ton of snow.

Then to the woodpile I did go.

But there’s one trail that still not done,

That used to rank as Number One,

And now I feel like a lazy louse:

I didn’t shovel out the old outhouse.

We got an indoor job last June.

I swore I wouldn’t use it soon.

“It’s for the wife and kids,” I said.

While manly pride filled up my head.

But these days when my tea kicks in,

I stay inside with guilty grin,

And from a big newspaper stack

I read the sports page front to back.

My words of pride are sounding hollow.

And if you ask, I’ll have to swallow

Hard and answer straight:

The outhouse now don’t seem so great.

Oh, that old north wind feels cold

On the backside of a 40-year-old!

And there’s 30 feet or more

Of snow before I reach its door.

Grandma once said something funny,

How they used to skin a bunny.

Around the hole they’d put the fur.

I guess that really tickled her.

But inside mine it’s not a treat

To settle on that frosty seat.

No matter how I have to go,

It’s just no fun at 10 below.

I guess I haven’t found the habit

Of sacrificing some poor rabbit

I’d have to pity that poor hare.

It’s something that I couldn’t bare.

Another reason I’m perturbed:

My catalogues are undisturbed

Victoria’s Secret goes unread

No flights of fancy fill my head.

They’re lying in the old two-holer

Right below the paper roller.

They’re used in an emergency

When I’ve gone through the last Τ.P.

I’d better stop this poem before

My mother reads it and gets sore.

Bathroom humor gets her mad.

The two-holed kind is twice as bad.

Still I miss my time alone

In the outhouse. There I’ve grown

To like the songs of chickadees

As they flit among the trees.

The dog will come and say hello,

Some rabbit tracks will dot the snow.

The snowy garden corn stalks bring

A smile of hope and thoughts of spring.

So when the snow begins to melt

And warmer temperatures are felt,

I won’t whine, complain, or grouse.

I’ll shovel that path to the old outhouse.