Behind the Lines: by David Heiller

David Heiller The sounds of basketball cut through the chilly air two nights ago. Α slightly de flated 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 Ma rch 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 beck...

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 ...

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 plann...

David Heiller As we headed outside for a walk on Saturday a fternoon, 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 sta rted 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 ...