Behind the Lines: by David Heiller

David Heiller Dear Grandma: We came to the stop sign by Banning Junction. My window was frosted over. Cindy couldn’t see the on-coming traffic. I pushed the button and down came the window, all the way down. Cindy has asked me not to lower it all the way down, but I forgot. The window hasn’t been working all the time lately. It sometimes gets stuck in the open position. I have to open and close the door. Then it works again. Guess what happened last week? When I pushed the button to make the window go up, it wouldn’t budge. I opened and closed the door, and it still wouldn’t go up. It was 16 degrees below zero outside. The window was all the way open. So we drove the last four miles into Askov going 55 miles an hour, which created a wind-chill in the car of 82 degrees below zero. I put my coat, gloves, and hat back on, but it was still a chilly ride. Good old Sebald Motor Sales fixed it that day. I blame this little window incident on Christmas, Grandma, because it...

David Heiller Mom tried to sound nonchalant with her request. “Come see what I’ve got in the living room.” I walked into that familiar room and couldn’t help smile. A bright little Christmas tree stood on the table near the window. David and Fern In fact, I was a little shocked, because for the first time this Christmas season, I felt Christmas. Something clicked, and there it was, just a thought, “Hey, it’s Christmas!” Mom had gone to Mitchells to wish Doris and Mitch a happy 50th anniversary, and as usually happens when people go visit Doris and Mitch, she hadn’t left empty-handed. But no banjo parts for Mom — they had given her this tree. “It used to be Grandma Heiller’s,” Mom said. That made the tree glow even brighter. Grandma died 20 years ago this November. Her house was always a welcome spot, and never more so than at Christmas. It’s good to have a part of her with us this year in the form of the tree, and good to see it in Mom’s house. Mom was going to go wit...

David Heiller The thermometer read six degrees below zero on Sunday afternoon. I headed for the woods with a folding saw and tape measure in my coat pocket. The wind had died and the sun was shining, and six degrees below zero didn’t seem so bad, not on a Sunday afternoon in December. Even MacKenzie, one of our dogs, seemed improved by it. She had lain in the house all weekend, walking on three legs. Noah said he had seen her come up limping after a race with our other dog, Sully. Mollie wanted us to call the veterinarian. Cindy and I thought we should wait. Could this be the same MacKenzie on Sunday afternoon, running through the woods ahead of me, with barely a limp to see? She couldn’t resist the beautiful brisk day. Mother Nature is a quick healer. I walked along the north line of our property, looking for a Christmas tree. There’s a white spruce that would do. But only as a last resort. They lose their needles too fast. We’ve had a few holidays where the tree looks...

David Heiller Dear Grandma: I guess it’s that time again, to tell you about the kids’ Christmas program last Sunday. The Sunday School crew did “real fine,” as you would say. For a while though, it looked like the halos and crowns would come crashing down, bringing the entire kindergarten class along. It started with Kimberly’s halo, a heavy wire shaped to fit around her head, then bent into another circle up above and covered with tinfoil. The thing worked for a while. Maybe three minutes. Then Kim figured out that this fancy halo was nothing more than a coat hanger digging into her skull. Grandma O and Malika and what they both loved: each other and Christmas treats So she took it off. Which meant that Mollie and Chelsea and Tanya and Laura all realized that THEIR crowns and halos also felt like something out of the Spanish Inquisition. One by one, they re-arranged their headgear, taking them off, twisting them, having them slide over their eyes, dropping them on...

David Heiller Thank goodness for folks like Vonnie Vayder. She imparted a bit of wisdom the other day that almost stopped me in my tracks. I had just taken a picture of her with some of her students at the Pine County Area Learning Center. They had painted a beautiful Christmas card, four feet high by eight feet wide, and placed it outside their school in Finlayson. I was flustered by a day with too much to do, with a sick little girl, with forgetting my camera, with a dozen other pressures that always seem to rear up at this time of year, at Christmas-time. As Vonnie and I walked back into the school, I asked her what she liked about making Christmas cards with her students. She liked the cooperation it brought out, she said. And she said that it gives a more realistic sense of Christmas than what the students might see on television commercials, for example. Christmas doesn’t always live up to a person’s expectations, she said. “And they (students) get uptight about th...

David Heiller The deer steeped into our headlights just as we reached the top of the hill west of Sturgeon Lake. We were heading home from the Moose Lake/Willow River football game Friday night, at about 11 p.m. “Deer!” Cindy shouted, the way a soldier might shout “Grenade!” in a World War Two movie. I slammed on the brakes, but it was too late. We hit the deer dead on. It flipped over the bumper and crashed into the windshield. Both air bags popped open. We skidded to a stop. Everyone was OK, except the deer. We sat in a daze from the crash and the air bags and the awful feeling of hitting a living creature. My mind shifted quickly to wondering how much this was going to cost. Then we staggered out of the car, coughing from the strong fumes that had emerged with the air bags. Joe Gibson pulled up behind us in his truck. “Seems like every time I see you, you’ve hit a deer,” he said, trying to inject a bit of humor into the situation. It wasn’t funny, but I cou...

David Heiller Ray Schutz had the tractor ready for me when I got to his farm in Winnebago Valley on Saturday morning. A light mist was falling, and mixed with an east wind and 35 degree temperature, it was a recipe for a chilly ride home. I didn’t care though. A fine adventure was looming, and cold weather won’t dampen that. Ray gave a few pointers on the Allis WD. “The brake is locked,” he said, pointing to a wire by the right foot brake. “Step on the brake and lift it up and it will come free.” He pushed up the hydraulic lever. First the mower came up in back, then the bucket rose in front. I couldn’t ride home like that. but if he lowered the bucket, the mower would come down too. So he found a chain in his shop and bound the mower in place. Then he lowered the bucket. A typical farmer trick. Very ingenious. “Did you bring gas?” he asked. I answered yes, and unscrewed the cap in the front. “That’s the radiator,” he said, informing me that it did have antifreeze in it....

David Heiller I wonder if Albert Einstein ever went on a diet. Losing weight might have led to his discovery of the theory of relativity. The exact same weight going up looks a lot different coming down. Take the number 217, for instance. When my bathroom scale first showed me the number 217, oh so many years ago, I looked at it in shock and embarrassment. A conversation like this took place: “Two hundred seventeen? What’s wrong with this scale? Cindy, have you checked this scale lately?" David didn't feel so  good at this weight. My wife, Cindy, is always checking the scale. She has it calibrated to within a sixteenth of an ounce. She could weigh gold dust on it. “Yes honey, the scale is right,” she answered in a patient voice. I quit weighing myself shortly after that. But that didn’t stop me from gaining weight. I don’t know what I peaked at. I don’t want to know. I think 230. Cindy thinks quite a bit higher. Now the numbers are heading back down. ...

David Heiller “If you could give anyone one gift, what would it be?” We’ve asked our friends, from playmates on the playground to roommates in college, that question. When we were younger, we said things like “A million bucks,” or “That red head in biology class.” But I would bet most adults would answer, “Good health.” Three people have me thinking about good health these days, before Thanksgiving is totally digested and before Christmas roars into full commercial overdrive. First, there’s my Grandma Schnick. Grandma Schnick is Grandma Schnick was always willing to play a game of football with Noah. 92 years old. She still lives at home. She is in good health, despite a stroke and a heart attack in her past. She doesn’t drive a car, but that’s not surprising because she never drove a car. She does climb the stairs to her home above my mother several times a day, and she walks to the post office for the mail every day. I think that keeps her as healthy as her ...

David Heiller “Dad there’s a deer out in the field.” I was only half awake when Noah said that on Saturday morning. I had heard him come down the stairs at 6:15, half an hour earlier, so I got out of bed to give him a little moral support. It’s nice to have someone to mumble to before an early outing. The temperature was a balmy 32 degrees, but he had on long johns, sweat pants, wool pants, two pairs of socks, a T-neck, a jacket, a sweat shirt, a stocking cap, and choppers. For some reason, we think of deer hunting as a bone chilling experience, and Noah wasn’t taking any chances. I went back to bed, still half asleep, as Noah stepped into the dim dawn. Then he told me about the deer in the field, and I was wide awake. I stepped onto the deck, and looked at the field. I heard the deer snort before I saw it. It sounded like an air horn. It’s a loud and startling noise even when you are expecting it, and I wasn’t. “See it?” Noah asked. My eyes, even with glasses,...