‘Tis the season for basketball ~ March 27, 1997

David Heiller

The sounds of basketball cut through the chilly air two nights ago. Α slightly deflated ball dribbled on the dirt court, which also doubles as our driveway.

The ball banged on the rim. Α yell of satisfaction from one boy cut the air as the ball eased over it and through the net. The other boy grumbled a response, took the ball and dribbled and shouted and shot.

Basketball in March in Minnesota has its own season, just like spring, summer, fall, and winter. It’s a lot shorter, but it is still a power to be reckoned with. Especially this year. This year is special.

I watched my son and his friend for a few minutes on Sunday night, playing in the light of the pole barn. Α full moon was rising to add a touch of class. There was even a comet in the northwest riding shotgun over the scene.

“Life will never get better than that,” I thought to myself. You’re 13. Well, that’s not so easy. But with a basketball in your hand and a week’s worth of Easter vacation beckoning like a fast break, you can’t complain.

So you pretend you’re Sam Jacobson, and the clock is winding down against Kentucky, and you get the pass, and you go up for a jump shot and let the ball go with no time on the clock, and it swishes.

David had a unique version of one-on-one that they played nearly everyday.

Oops. It clanked off the rim. It didn’t go in. No problem. You were fouled! Two shots, and you’re down by one point. In goes the first one. It’s all tied up, folks. In goes the second. The Gophers win the national title! Α few sound effects are in order now. Listen to that crowd roar!

I don’t know if that’s what goes through my son’s mind as he plays outside on these March days and nights. But I’ve got a hunch it is, if he’s like his old man and about three million other guys.

When I was his age, we had a basketball season that always seemed to coincide with the high school tournament. It wasn’t organized. We didn’t have coaches, or crazy practice schedules, or 100-mile bus rides. A bunch of kids from town would gather and we’d find a cement driveway that had a basket against the garage, and we’d play.

We weren’t very good. I’m sure a big city team would have cleaned our clocks. But we thought we were good, and that was what mattered. We played fair. We called our own fouls, and were basically honest.

The night games at the school ground with my brother Danny were the most fun for me. The ground under the two baskets was bare, due to the fact that the two baskets represented first base and third base during the baseball season. Baseball in Brownsville far exceeded basketball’s comet-like moment in the sun.

In March, that ground would turn pretty muddy. It was like playing on a dirty sponge. We’d come home with dirt ground into our hands and arms and sleeves and jeans. Mom never complained.

David in about '66

But at night the ground would harden up. Then it was like a real court, although not always very smooth. That didn’t matter. We could dribble on it, and it evened up the odds a bit, since Danny was three years older and could outplay me on cement.

Playing alone was fun too. You could make up your own scenario, be any star you wanted to be. Someone from Edina or Duluth East, whoever was strarring in that year’s state tournament. Or even a Minnesota Gopher. And you always won. I never lost one game at the school grounds when I played by myself.

One night, playing with my brother, my foot curled over when I stepped on a clump of frozen mud. A needle of pain went through my foot, and I screamed and fell down. Danny, being a true big brother, stole the ball and made the basket while I lay on the ground in agony.

I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. I think I did both. Then he helped me home. Mom took me to the doctor the next day, and an X-ray showed a broken bone right where I knew it would. Thus ended the 1966 basketball season.

David's alma mater, the Minnesota Gophers

Basketball season is special because of memories like that, and because I get to watch history repeat itself these days when my son plays outside on March nights.

This year it is special also because of the Minnesota Gophers. I don’t know if they will win the national tale this Saturday and Monday. But listening to them on the radio all year, and watching them in the NCAA tournament, has been a real treat. It has brought excitement to our family much like the Twins did in 1987 and 1991.

Go Gophers. Win or lose, we owe you a big thank you.

The sweet mysteries of spring ~ March 23, 1995

by David Heiller

The mystery of spring has struck, and all the explanations in the world won’t stop me from gawking.

Sweet, sweet mystery of Spring!

Take those maple trees. We drilled 43 holes and hammered in aluminum taps on March 11, right at the start of a warm spell.

Eighteen inches of snow carpeted the woods that Saturday, and three days later, the carpet was threadbare.

That in itself mystified a lot of people. It was the talk of the town. “What happened to the snow? How could so much snow disappear so fast?”

But maple trees offer a bigger mystery. You’d think when the warm weather hit, the sap would have flowed fast and filled our buckets. That didn’t happen. The sap didn’t run at all during that warm spell, when it was 60 during the day and 40 at night.

Jim Sales, a friend from Askov who used to tend the maple trees at Audubon Center of the North Woods in Sandstone, told me why: the trees need cold nights to go with the warm days.

The cold nights tell the maple trees to pull their sap into their roots to protect themselves. Then during the warm days, the sap rises, and if you have a tap in the tree, some of it drips out into a bucket.

I had read about Jim’s explanation before. I knew the “what,” that nights below freezing and days above freezing meant that sap flowed well. But I didn’t know the “why,” and I will try to forget it as soon as possible. The simple mystery of flowing sap is enough to make me marvel at life returning to the North Country.

I marvel even more as 40 gallons of sap are boiled down into one utterly delicious gallon of syrup. That’s another mystery of nature. How is this possible? Who the heck discovered it? How did they stumble upon such a lucky find?

Planting the year before.
 Good parsnips take almost a year!

PARSNIPS offer another mystery to me. We planted a bed of them last spring, and weeded and thinned them, then left them in the garden over the winter. Alvin Jensen of Askov says this gives them a sweeter taste.

I dug half a dozen out on Sunday, washed and peeled them, sliced them in a pan and fried them in butter. They were delicious. My wife said they tasted good enough to eat like breakfast cereal, with milk in a bowl. Some people like to sprinkle brown sugar on them, to make them even sweeter.

But why hadn’t they frozen, like everything else in the garden? They weren’t even mulched. And why are they better in the spring than they are in the fall?

HONEYBEES offer another mystery to me. They are flying in this warm weather, looking for food, cleaning out their hives. They survived 30-below-zero nights by huddling in a ball 20,000 strong. At the center of the ball is a queen, who mated one time and has 200,000 eggs to show for it.

She lays those eggs, they develop into larva, the larva turn into bees, the bees collect nectar and ingest it and expel it and fan their wings and the next thing you know, there’s a hive full of honey. Something that mankind, for all his explanations and knowledge, cannot make.

Don’t answer the whys in this column. Sometimes its better just to marvel at nature. Be thankful for the sweet things in life, like maple syrup and parsnips and honey bees.

With a little help, the first step was easy ~ March 19, 2001

David Heiller

Collin and I headed for the woods late on Saturday afternoon. A fogbank had lifted from my throbbing head. The beauty of the day was suddenly revealed.

Mid-March. Temperature forty degrees. Sun shining. Duh. It’s time to tap trees.

I couldn’t quite muster an exclamation point behind that last sentence, thanks to a nasty cold and the thought of all the work that lay ahead. I don’t have a spring in my step when I tap maple trees anymore.

Collin and David with Rosie, 2003 or 4.

But I did have a helper at least, a nephew, age eight, who is always on the prowl for projects like this. Usually they involve building things like forts, scooters, or the Taj Mahal. Tapping maple trees would do just fine for him, and that was just fine with me.

Why is it that a mundane job is so much more enjoyable with a kid around? I carried a hammer and bucket and one tap. Collin carried the brace and bit. Our dog, MacKenzie, went along. We walked single file on the snowshoe trail. We didn’t sink down, until we came to the first sugar maple on the edge of the woods. Then we stepped off the hard trail and into 30 inches of snow. But we waded through it, maybe even with a spring in our steps. This was an adventure, remember?

And we were eager to see if the sap was running. I was a little skeptical. “It’s a little early yet,” I had told Cindy in my best imitation of someone who knows what he is talking about. But Cindy insisted it would be flowing.

I drilled a hole into the tree, tapped in a metal spigot, and a few seconds later sap started trickling out. There are times when I don’t mind when Cindy is right. This was one of them.

Noah getting sap straight from the source,
when he helped out with the project.

I leaned over and slurped up some sap. Early sap is always the sweetest, and this was no exception. Collin had a taste too. “It’s sweet,” he said with a bit of surprise in his voice.

We walked back to the house, grabbed more buckets and taps, and hit half a dozen more trees before we ran out of time and had to head in.

“Well, the sap is running,” I said in a matter-of-fact voice when I saw Cindy in the kitchen. She just smiled.

MacKenzie, Collin, and I returned to the sugar bush the next morning carrying 10 more buckets. This time we wore snow shoes. Collin fit into a spare pair. They were almost as big as he was, but after a few tumbles he learned how to handle them. I could see that he was proud of himself. The snow had a thick crust on it that held us up. That made the job a lot more enjoyable. It was a heavenly morning, sun shining, temperatures in the twenties. We were on top of the snow, and on top of the world.

We came to a dead basswood tree. The snow underneath was littered with wood chips. The tree looked like someone had scooped deep trenches in it. Collin asked about it. I told him that a pileated woodpecker had done it. We both felt that the woodpecker must have eaten well.

After we finished tapping, Collin wanted to keep walking, so we hiked through the woods, MacKenzie by our side and very happy to be on top of the snow instead of up to her belly.

We talked about other hikes we had gone on. We talked about fishing, and exploring the river by his house. Important things. There really isn’t much in this world that is finer than walking in the woods with a nice kid and talking about things like that.

Collin: David's fishing buddy,
and maple syrup pal!

We walked back to the house and had dinner, then Collin and his family headed home.

I still had about 30 taps to put in, so Mack and I walked back out. The snow had softened, and the snowshoes no longer held me or the dog. I slogged through it, tapping tree after tree. Slow and steady wins the race when it comes to making maple syrup. You can’t rush Mother Nature.

That’s one thing I like about it. It’s a job with a nice, easy pace, something that the rest of my life doesn’t always have.

It is a lot of work, but satisfying when you smell the sugar in the air and taste the first syrup. It’s a time for the family to work together. Cindy and I do most of it. Our two teen-age kids will help gather and fire and boil and can too, although they aren’t exactly willing workers.

Collin hasn’t reached that lovely stage of life yet. That’s why I felt happy and a bit honored that he had helped me with the first leg. The first step is sometimes the hardest. He made it a lot easier. I have a hunch he feels the same way.

To cut, and not to cut ~ March 26, 1992

David Heiller 

The widow maker stood in our woods last Thursday morning, calmly waiting for a man to come its way.

Deane circled it cautiously; chainsaw in hand, the way a cowboy might circle a raging black stallion. He eyed the basswood tree, which had snapped in a strong west wind about eight feet above the ground. Its top rested on four other basswoods, and a large birch, all of which were bent from the extra weight.

What I saw was a lot of firewood, dry on the stump, waiting for my woodstove. What Deane saw was a spring loaded, three-ton wooden widow maker.

Finally he turned to me with a grin. “I’m not cutting that down,” he said. “Mother nature will take care of it for you.”

I was surprised, for perhaps two seconds. Deane Hillbrand handles a chainsaw better than anyone I’ve ever seen. He builds log and timber frame homes for a living. Trees fall where he wants them to.

Deane and Kathryn Hillbrand

But part of a person’s skill with a tool includes knowing what he cannot do, or more precisely, what he should not do. He might have cut the widow maker just fine. But a tree under pressure might fall the wrong way, or snap and spring where you least expect it. That’s why broken trees like those are called widow makers. Α cord of firewood wasn’t worth the risk of a crushed limb, or worse.

We walked on through the woods, on top of the crusted snow, looking for more trees. It was lovely walking, above the deadfall and under-brush. The whole woods seemed open and inviting.

Deane had come over to cut a basswood. He wanted to make some chair seats, and needed some wide boards. Our woods hold some huge basswood. The honey bees love them, and we love their honey. So I love those basswoods. But I told him he could have one off our land, if he would cut some trees.

First Deane spied a dead birch. He dropped it where he wanted, then told me gently, “You’re not cutting this up for firewood.”

“Why?”

“This is a saw log,” he answered. It was a handsome length of log, 22½ feet long, and solid.

I had looked at the birch and seen firewood. Deane had seen boards. But he was right. It would be a travesty to cut a log like that into firewood. There was plenty of firewood in the top branches.

We moved west, over a frozen creek. A skin of ice crashed underneath us. I plummeted a whole six inches until stopping on solid ice. Six inches or six feet, your heart still pounds when that happens.

Deane spotted two red oaks, one dead, the other nearly so. “I hate to say it, Dave,” he began with a laugh. He didn’t have to finish. Another saw log. Sure enough, after he dropped it, we measured 34 feet from the 25-inch butt to the first limbs. We counted 93 rings on the trunk. It has started growing about the time Grandma Schnick was born. There is plenty of firewood in the top, I thought again.

We left the other red oak standing, which was even bigger. It had a few years of life yet; a few branches had budded out. It would wait right where it was.

We found and cut a few other dead birch and maple, which were pure firewood trees. I shouldn’t say we. Deane had the sharper eyes and the sharper saw. I walked along and enjoyed the easy hiking on the firm snow, enjoyed the sunny, 25-degree morning, enjoyed the hawks and nuthatches, and enjoyed watching Deane work.

As we neared the edge of the woods, Deane pointed to a lone tree about 50 yards ahead. “Look at that white oak,” he said. Sure enough, when we got up to it, it was a huge old white oak that was also dying.

“Let’s cut it down,” I said with a little hesitancy. This was an old, old tree, and you don’t cut down trees like that without a lump in your throat. But like the others we had cut, it was dead or dying. There are plenty of other trees for the pileated woodpeckers and red squirrels.

Noah playing 'jack-in-the-box' an elm
stump Deane assisted us with in an earlier year.

Deane cut his notch, then ran the 20-inch bar through the bottom of the tree, working from both sides. At first, it didn’t fall. I stood behind a tree 30 feet away. Another widow maker? Deane eyed his escape path. He always clears a path to safety if a tree doesn’t cooperate. He pounded a wedge into the crack until the wedge disappeared. Then the white oak sighed and tumbled and hit the snow with a final crash.

We counted the rings on the trunk: 182. This tree was already 108 years old when the Moose Lake Fire of 1918 swept north of our land. “It’s probably the oldest tree in your woods,” Deane said.

Deane discovered a hollow section starting 14 feet up the trunk. He cut a two-foot-long piece, then hollowed the rotten part out with his saw Perfect flower planters for Cindy, I thought.

Below that was saw log. Above it was firewood, lots of it.

I asked Deane to cut a 4-inch-thick slice from the stump. It is 43-inches across. I’m going to sand it and oil it and count the rings and think of all it has seen.

By then it was after noon. The crusty snow was starting to break up. We trudged in for chicken soup and corn bread and maple syrup.

Deane never did cut his basswood tree. Somehow it wouldn’t have seemed right to cut down a healthy, living tree. Deane knows what you should cut, and what you shouldn’t.

Never too old to learn ~ March 28, 1996

by David Heiller

Sometimes I’m not the greatest dad or husband. That rooster came home to roost last weekend.

Malika and David with MacKenzie: a hammock moment.

Our daughter, Malika, complained of stomach pains on Friday. She told her teacher, who called us and left a message on our answering machine. Then she went to the office and they called us and did the same thing. Then Mollie slept until her school bus came and brought her home.

I was home by then, and expected to see a sick kid limp off the bus. Quite the contrary. Mollie had brought a friend home with her, as she had pre-arranged to do, and her mysterious stomach pain seemed to have disappeared.

Like a good dad, I thought she had been faking it. Hey, it’s been known to happen.

Malika complained again that night before going to bed, and Cindy gave her a tylenol. Then she woke up in the middle of the night, and complained again, so we let her sleep on the couch.

When day broke, Malika still had her pain, so Cindy took her to the emergency room at about 7:30 a.m. “Maybe it’s her appendix,” she said.

“No way, it’s not her appendix,” I said. It’s never the appendix.”

They did a few tests, and thought maybe it could be her appendix. They told Cindy to keep an eye on Malika and let them know if the pain got worse.

Ms. Malika, earlier that winter.

It did get worse. She laid on the couch and slept and watched TV all morning and into the afternoon. And this was with a friend around, a friend that is always on the go, playing, exploring, building forts. Mollie didn’t play with her friend, didn’t help us plant seeds, didn’t eat tuna fish sandwiches. She was in a lot of pain. So Cindy took her back to the doctor at about 2 p.m.

Old skeptical Dave still wasn’t convinced. Maybe a cast iron skillet up side the head would have helped, but Cindy was too busy with Mollie for that.

So I took Malika’s friend home, and stopped on the way back to visit with some friends, and when I finally rolled home an hour later, our son met me at the door with the news that Malika had to have her appendix out and Mom was trying to call me and where the heck was I anyway and I’d better call Mom at the hospital right away.

The dog house outside was empty, and I felt like crawling into it.

But I faced the executioner and called Cindy and hustled to Moose Lake and we took Malika to St. Luke’s in Duluth where a doctor tapped and prodded and listened with his stethoscope and even then I thought he was going to say it was something else.

He proclaimed that Malika had a bad appendix. An hour later Malika had her appendix removed. It had a bad infection in it.

Daddy had other opportunities to rescue Malika, 
such as digging her out of a bottomless frostboil.

Malika stayed at St. Luke’s until Monday. She has to stay home from school for a week. She’ll recover fine. It’s just an appendix, for crying out loud.

There I go again.

I’m making light of it here, but I blew it, and maybe I’ll recover from my hands off approach to illness too. Maybe I’m making a sexist generalization, or trying to share my guilt, but I think we dads are a bit more removed from our kids’ and spouses’ ailments than we should be, and don’t always take them seriously. We don’t even take our own illnesses seriously.

(Dads, help me out! Write a lot of letters to the editor confirming that I’m not the only Idiot Father in Minnesota.)

When someone gets sick around our house, I usually say, “Why don’t you take a walk, and get some fresh air? That always helps me.”

If Cindy hadn’t been around, I probably would have made Mollie walk to the culvert and back. I would have waited a lot longer before taking Malika to the doctor. Maybe too long, which could have resulted in a ruptured appendix, which could have led to fertility problems and other infections.

We’re never too old to learn. I’m living proof of that.

Heiller jinxes and other Get-a-ways ~ March 25, 1993

David Heiller

I wrote a column on March 11 about the imminent return of spring. I drew on crack observations like owls hooting, skunks spraying, sap running.

Then on March 13, the temperature dropped to 14 below zero. The next night, the temperature fell to 10 below zero. And on March 17, St. Patrick’s Day, it was 12 below. We wrote it on the calendar.

Winter gets long...
 lap sitting and getting away can help!

In fact since that brilliant column two weeks ago, the temperature hasn’t risen above freezing. However, the temperature today (Saturday, March 20) is supposed to rise above freezing, and by next week, it’s going to hit 50, so the weather man says.

Therefore, to avoid another Heiller Jinx, I am going on record: spring is a good two months away. We are going to have three more blizzards before May 1. Your pipes are going to freeze, and your car won’t start. The owls will fly back to Capistrano, the skunks will return to their dank dens, and the only sap you’ll see is me.

NOW when the weather turns nice, you can thank me.

And here’s another prediction: The Twins will finish last in the American League West this year, winning 69 and losing 93.

Buy your World Series tickets now.

Saying “Thank you.”

When I was a kid, the city of New Albin, Iowa, would show free movies outside every Friday night. Our family and cousins would drive 14 miles to see it. We would spread a blanket on the dewy grass and eat popcorn and watch some movie that wasn’t very good. That didn’t matter. It was an adventure that included playing and fighting and staying up late under the stars.

Part of the fun was getting to go to the grocery store to buy a Popsicle or Sugar Babies or some other treat. One night, when I was about eight, I bought something and said thank you and the sales lady said I was the politest boy she had waited on all night.

I like to tell our kids that story. I’ve embellished it to the point where there is a plaque in the store in my honor. I still remember the incident, and I bring it up now because I read recently in an article about good salesmanship, how you should say “thank you” often.

I had to agree, but not just because I sell advertising as part of my job. I LIKE to say “thank you.” It feels good.

It’s good to hear others say thank you. When I call on Moose Lake Implement for advertising, I will say thank you when I’m leaving, and 99 percent of the time, someone will answer, “Thank YOU.” It’s almost guaranteed. Maybe that’s one reason why they are so successful.

Or go into Stanton Lumber in Askov; even if you don’t buy anything, before you leave the store, Mary Jo Jensen will hit you with a “thank you.”

It doesn’t come naturally to everyone. My daughter, Malika, is distributing Girl Scout cookies now. I had to give her a nudge today when she gave Palmer Dahl his box of Thin Mints and took his $2.50. “Thanks” she said. By the time she has distributed all 67 boxes, she should have it down.

I hope someday it comes naturally to her, and that some store clerk compliments her on her good manners.

The Garden Get-a-way.
We both loved the garden, but it was David's away place.

Do you have a “get-a-way”?

Angie Kretzschmar, Willow River, told me about her “get-a-way” last week. It’s a shed attached to her garage where she likes to sit in the summer.

She said the spot holds a bit of magic. She wrote a family history book in the summer of 1991 in her get-a-way. Writing in this comfortable spot, with birds and flowers just outside the window, and the wind blowing through the pines, the words came rushing out. She wrote her book in one week, which I find pretty amazing.

Mrs. Kretzschmar showed me The Get-a-way (it deserves to be capitalized) on March 19 during an interview on her history book. It was cold, and her writing table was gone, and I must admit I couldn’t feel the magic.

That’s fine. It’s there for Mrs. Kretzschmar. Everybody needs his or her own get-a-way. Α spot where you feel relaxed, at home, at ease, and if you’re lucky, inspired enough to write a family history.

I mentioned Mrs. Kretzschmar’s Get-a-way to a friend on March 20. She said her friend’s log cabin is her get-a-way. She is an architect, and she said she recently sat in The Cabin (it deserves to be capitalized) and drew up plans for a house in four hours. That’s fast.

I don’t have a year-round get-a-way. But for about four months every year, my get-a-way is the garden. I can almost always find peace and strength in the garden no matter how ornery and tired I am. Especially with a Twins game on the radio.

Spring is definitely on its way ~ March 11, 1993

David Heiller

“Oh, you’re writing about mud,” Cindy said when I told her what this column was about.

Spring. That’s what this column is about, and maybe it IS too early to think about it. You meet Art Christensen out for his morning walk in Askov, and he^’ll warn you that there’s more snow and cold coming. But you can tell by the swagger in his step that he knows: spring is coming.

The signs are subtle. Grass is showing through in spots in the yard, but it’s not really grass, it’s more of a soggy brown washcloth than grass.

Patches of ice form on the driveway when we get up, but by 10 a.m. they are patches of water and mud. It’s time to put away the Sorels and put on the knee-high rubber boots, the mud boots.

The muck puts sleepy animals on the move. Their cozy dens are now swimming pools. Maybe it was time to get up anyway.

You see skunks everywhere. A young one sat in our driveway on Tuesday afternoon, March 2, calmly eating a rotting deer skin that I had been planning to tan. Luckily the dog was in the house.

The skunk looked cute from a distance. Then Thursday night, the air filled with the smell of skunk spray, stinking to high Heaven. Some songs are true: on Saturday we took a walk and found the small skunk dead at the side of the road.

In Askov on March 8, a muskrat had built a home in a snow bank a stone’s throw from our office building. He thinks that big puddle of water is a lake. He’s thinking spring.

Signs of spring in the woods

Out in the woods, there’s still a foot of snow, but you can almost see it shrinking before your eyes. It’s not the same fine stuff that fell back in December. The snow today has the consistency of cracked corn. It falls into little pieces when you pick it up in the afternoon. In the morning, it has a crust that ALMOST holds you up. Just when you think you can walk on top, UGGH, your foot goes plunging through, jarring your knee. Sore knees: another sign of spring.

It’s good snow for dogs and bad snow for deer. The dogs stay on top, the deer don’t. The two don’t mix very well. A neighbor jumped a deer that was badly cut up in the woods on Saturday, March 6. The snow, stained with big patches of blood, was torn with the struggle of deer and dog.

The birds know spring is near. The chickadees are trying to out-sing each other every morning; the blue jays are honking for a last meal. Crows are moving about, and owls hoot at night, Coyotes are howling too, which means they are mating, according to a friend, and isn’t that sign of spring?

The sap is running

The sap is running too. I tapped our maple trees on March 3. Ideal tapping weather is when temperatures get above freezing during the day and below freezing at night. That’s a sign of spring.

You hear the plunk-plunk of sap dripping into plastic buckets, and it’s a good sound. They are giving more than half gallon a day, except for the ash tree that I tapped. That bucket is bone dry. I tap an ash every year, just to make sure that God hasn’t changed his mind.

He hasn’t, so I moved the tap to a healthy maple, and the sap was flowing out of the 9/16 inch hole before I could pound the tap in.

The kids like to drink sap right from the buckets. I do too. You can taste the sugar in it. It’s cold and sweet, and it tastes like spring.

And when the air fills with the smell of boiling sap, you can smell spring. There^’s no other smell quite like it.

So maybe the marsh marigolds aren’t blooming. Eng. Maybe the frost boils haven’t hit the back roads, and maybe the frogs aren’t peeping. Maybe we’ll even get a “tournament blizzard”

Maybe the calendar doesn’t say March 20 yet. But spring is coming. It’s definitely coming.

Sweating it out on a March walk ~ March 12, 1987

David Heiller

As we headed outside for a walk on Saturday afternoon, I glanced at the indoor-outdoor thermometer. I looked again, more closely.

Nah, it couldn’t be. I started to say something but stopped. My eyes were playing tricks on me. Seventy-two degrees?

As I sat outside putting on my boots, Cindy and the kids came rushing past. “It’s 72 degrees!” Cindy said.

Oh Spring!

“It can’t be 72 degrees,” I said, even though I had just looked at the thermometer myself. “Are you sure it wasn’t 62 degrees?”

“No, it’s 72 degrees,” she repeated.

We started on our second walk of the day. This time we had a menagerie, Steve Bonkoski and his four children, plus Cindy and me with our two. As we straggled out onto the gravel road heading south, Cindy pointed down the road. A 30 foot stretch of road was covered with flowing water. On our first walk that morning, the road had been bare.

Seventy twο degree March days will do that to Pine County roads.

Not many minutes passed before we realized just what a 72-degree March day means to Minnesotans. I was wearing a tee shirt and long sleeved work shirt, while Cindy had on a heavy sweater, and Steve wore a wool shirt plus a seven month old sleeping boy on his back. We wore lined boots on our feet. The children all had their winter coats on, too.

To make matters worse, I had offered to pull the wagon, So twο of the kids took me upon that. Try pulling a wagon of kids on muddy roads wearing lined boots and a heavy shirt in 72-degree heat.

Olympic Triathlon winners don’t train that hard.

Still we trudged on, saying nothing to each other.

It’s sacrilegious to complain about such weather in March. Yοu do that, and an Armistice Day blizzard is likely to sweep you off your feet in a hurry.

The kids didn’t seem to mind nearly so much. They had spied the water on the road, and their pace picked up accordingly. They splashed through the deepest part. Even Malika, the youngest walker at 20 months, dismounted from the wagon to wade through the water, which nearly poured over the top of her boots.

We passed the lake, keeping a steady pace, except for Steve’s son, Brooks, who was enjoying the water more than anybody. We moved ahead, giving an occasional holler at the two-year-old. Finally Brooks hollered back. He was leaning crazily to one side, like a human Tower of Pisa. We gaped at him, and yelled for him tο come. He called back in a tiny voice, “Stuck.”

The mud on the shoulder of the road held him like a tar baby. He couldn’t move, only lean in our general direction.

Steve ran back and rescued his son, and the walk proceeded to the top of the hill a quarter mile away. Then we turned around and headed hack. By this time, half an hour into the walk, sweat poured off our faces. Even the kids knew we had goofed, dressing like Eskimos on a day like this. Finally Solee, who is nine and reads a lot of books, broached the subject. “This is crazy, why are we dressed like this?” she demanded.

I tried to find an adult answer. “Because it’s March, see, and we are used to March weather, so psychologically, we dressed for colder weather.” I thought if I used the word “psychologically,” she would be satisfied.

“What difference does it make if it’s March?” she persisted. “We wouldn’t be dressed like this if it was May.”

“Yes, but the weather can change in a hurry,” I answered, thinking of that Armistice Day blizzard again. Solee didn’t remember that November 11, 1940, storm when the temperature was 60 degrees in the morning and howling, snowy cold at two that afternoon. Of course, I didn’t remember it either.

“You’re crazy,” she said, with a steady look.

“Yeah, you’re right,” I admitted.

When we got home, we took off our shirts and sweaters and boots and babies. We had overheated like stubborn Norwegian bachelor farmers, unwilling to take off their long-underwear before June first. But no one complained.

You don’t complain about 72-degree March days. You never know when that blizzard will come.

A new outlook on life ~ March 8, 2001

by David Heiller

“Did you get a good cornea?” I asked Dr. Skorich. I was lying in the pre-operational room at Miller Dwan Medical Center on Wednesday morning, February 28.

Dr. Daniel Skorich answered that yes, the numbers looked good. “It came from Florida,” he said.

David in pirate-mode on his banjo.
He had three cornea transplants. (One didn't do so well.) 
Each one was a time of gratitude and hopefulness.

“So you’re going to have a sunny disposition,” the anesthetist joked as he wheeled me into the operating room.

By this time I had a very sunny outlook on life. It had a lot to do with whatever it was he had injected into my intravenous tube. I didn’t have a care in the world. I wasn’t worried at all about having my old cornea cut off and a new one—from Florida!—sewn on.

That’s what happened over the next hour. I could see out of my left eye, which was draped with a cloth. My right eye was open, but I couldn’t see out of it. That was the result of another shot that Dr. Skorich had given me under the eye.

He gave me updates during the operation. “We’ve got the old cornea off,” he said.

Great, I thought. I couldn’t seem to get the words to come out of my mouth.

“We’ve got the new cornea half on,” he said a bit later.

Take your time, I thought.

“A couple more sutures.”

No problem.

Then it was over. Dr. Skorich said that it went well and it was a good match. He looked tired—it was his fifth corneal transplant of the day. I was wheeled to my hospital room, and 90 minutes later I was on my way home.

It is hard to imagine how uncomfortable those surgeries might have been. 
David was not one to complain, and kept his upbeat attitude.

I wore a metal patch on my eye that day and night, then went back to Dr. Skorich the next day. His nurse took off the patch. The vision in my right eye was blurry. That’s normal, Dr. Skorich said a few minutes later. It will take about two months for the new cornea to adjust and for the swelling to go down. Then he will start removing stitches, which will reshape the cornea. He might leave some stitches in forever once he gets the shape right. “You need the patience of Job,” he told me.

I’ve lived with lousy vision for most of my life, I thought. Six months is a piece of cake.

If all goes well, after about six months my vision will be pretty close to normal, probably 20-40 or so. Then I’ll get a prescription for glasses that will make it perfect.

That’s something I haven’t had for a long time. When I went to the University of Minnesota at age 18, an eye doctor told me that I had karataconus, an eye disease that causes the cornea to become cone-shaped. It can’t be corrected with glasses, but it can be corrected with hard contact lenses. So I wore contact lenses for the next 29 years. The karataconus kept getting worse, and doctors had a more difficult time fitting my eyes with contact lenses.

A corneal transplant had never occurred to me. I thought I would always have bad vision and contact lenses that sometimes gave me fits.

Then Cindy heard about the cousin of a friend who had karataconus, and how her vision had been corrected with a corneal transplant. It’s funny how things like that work, how a casual conversation can lead to positive changes. We found out the name of her doctor—Dan Skorich in Duluth—and the rest is history.

Two nights after the operation, I walked out to the garage to do a chore. I looked up at the heavens, at the moon and the countless stars. When was the last time you looked at the night sky, I thought, thinking of my new eye. Whoever you were, thank you.

Modern medicine is a miracle. I say that with a knock on wood, because my new cornea and I have a long way to go. But to quote Humphrey Bogart, this could be the start of a beautiful friendship.