Behind the Lines: by David Heiller

David Heiller “David, be careful with that poison ivy!” Mom scolded. “Use a hoe.” Mom had asked me to remove a patch of poison ivy from her backyard on July 4. So I donned a pair of rubber gloves and started pulling it up. Fern's backyard was famously and beautifully WILD. Poison Ivy was an issue. “You don’t use a hoe on poison ivy,” I scoffed, ignoring her rare exclamation point. Mom had reason to worry about P.I. She had battled a rash on her arms a couple months ago. It could have been used in a textbook on bad cases of poison ivy. She had a huge, boiling, oozing red rash. I worked carefully, grabbing the plants by the roots, pulling them up, and piling them in the yard. Some of the branches had berries. The woody stalks were half an inch in diameter. They reminded me of a camp-out I had made with some friends when I was a teenager. We were fishing for bullheads in the Reno Bottoms, seven miles south of Brownsville. We went out to gather wood, careful to avoid ...

David Heiller Monday evening at 6 p.m.: I had just finished taking my first break between a busy day and an even crazier night, and some summer sausage and a cold rainbow trout have saved my sanity. It had been a hectic day. Piles of ads to write, people to call, stories to edit. I wasn’t half done, and started steeling myself for an All-Nighter on Tuesday. If there’s one thing I hate, it’s working all night. It used to be an adventure, like during the Askov fire. Hot news. Murders. Sex. (My imagination works overtime too during an All-Nighter.) But not anymore. There’s about as much adventure in your normal Askov American as there is at a canasta party. I knew it would be this way. I had taken a three-day weekend to Brownsville to visit my mother. And now I was paying for it. David's mother, Fern, and David Once during the day I even told Cindy that we shouldn’t have gone to Brownsville. “But we went to see your mother, David,” she answered, and I felt like a heel...

David Heiller It’s late on a Monday night. I should have written this hours ago. But I was too busy transplanting catnip and trumpet vines that my mother gave to me. I was going to write this column about Mom, what with Mother’s Day around the corner. I was going to find some poignant way to say how much she means to me. But I ended up planting three catnip plants and four trumpet vines instead. Mom would prefer it that way. Never put off tomorrow what you can do today, she says, and I do too. It’s one of my favorite sayings. We visited Mom last weekend. It rained most of the time, but that was fine. Rainy days in Brownsville are fine. You can sit and visit at the kitchen table, play the banjo or a game of Scrabble, maybe even watch the Twins play a game or national TV (they won!), and not feel too much guilt. It’s raining. At one point on Saturday, I told Mom I was going to take the plastic off the basement door. That was on my weekend job list, along with trimming the...