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...