Behind the Lines: by David Heiller

David Heiller Warm weather in January brings out the ice fisherman in many people, including me. I’m not a hardcore ice fisherman. I don’t have an ice house, or fancy auger. I don’t take trips to Mille Lacs. I don’t even chew sn ο ose. Still every year about this time, Ι get the urge to follow a primitive ritual and sit on a slab of ice and stare at two holes with bobbers that don’t move. My wife sensed it coming last weekend. She announced on Saturday night: “I’ll let you go ice fishing tomorrow if you let me sleep-in in the morning.” Even the thought of getting up with our two kids at 6 a.m.  didn't  quench the ice fishing thirst. “You got a, deal,” I replied. Sunday morning I called Stanley Bonk (in a tired voice) in Willow River, to ask him where a novice might have a little luck fishing this time of year. He said that it was slow all around. “How about Long Lake?” I asked. “Νaw, it’s slow there too,” he answered. Not to be discouraged, I called Calvin Pet...

David Heiller Blue Corn. Grape Harvest. Barn. Blue Hour. Harvest Gold. It sounds like a poet describing a Van Gogh painting. Wicker Basket. Mannered Gold. Venture Violet. Surf Green. Or maybe an Amish farmer a ft er his first trip to Bissen’s Tavern. But it’s none of the above. The answer is C, as in Cindy, at a paint store. This is our electrician wiring a light  in the entryway. But mostly it is a picture of  the color of the entryway/kitchen. It still pleases me. Yes, those All-American images are colors of paint that are starting to adorn the wall s of our new home, and picked out mostly by my fine wife, Cindy. Tim Serres, our plumber, summed it up best when he took a look at the bedroom that our daughter, Malika, is claiming. “So who’s the Vikings fan?” he asked. Tim, like all good plumbers, has a way of cutting to the chase. Sorry Tim, that’s not good old Viking purple. That’s Venture Violet, a color that Malika picked out. She takes a ft er her...

David Heiller Something was missing that I couldn’t put my finger on. Α good Christmas had just passed, but something was missing. Illness and cold weather sure weren’t absent. My brother-in-law had missed three days of work before driving seven hours to our house. He arrived sick and exhausted, and had no appetite. His daughter ran a 103 degree fever on Saturday afternoon and had to go to the emergency room. Then Cindy got sick to her stomach that night. You know what that means. Mother Nature topped this off with 28 degrees below zero a few hours later. We felt like prisoners in a holiday hospital. Our typical Christmas involves a lot of this, not so for the Christmas of 1993. Yes, there had been presents and church and games of 500 and good feelings all around. But something was missing, and I didn’t find it until Sunday afternoon. That’s when my sister-in-law Therese and I went skiing. The temperature rose to nine below zero, the warmest it would get. So we took...