Behind the Lines: by David Heiller

David Heiller F rost coated the grass on Monday morning when I stepped out of the house at 6 a.m. The thermometer said 28 degrees. But spring was definitely in the air. Why else would I have asked Cindy if she wanted to drink a cup of tea on the bench outside. Cindy glanced at the thermometer. “It’s below freezing,” she said, and I knew enough not to push the point. But a little frost couldn’t keep the secret of spring for long. You could feel the promise that something good was going to happen. The garden would grow. Elian [Gonzalez] would get to go home. The Twins would win the pennant. I must have been delirious. You feel like anything can happen on a day like Monday. I grabbed the clothes from the washing machine and headed for the line. Anytime you look forward to hanging up clothes, you know something is right. I didn’t know what it was until I silently pinned up jeans and towels and socks. That’s when I noticed the birds. The air was filled with a subtl...

David Heiller Sometimes pays to procrastinate. Andrew Larson pointed that out to me or Monday morning. Andrew is our graphic design worker. I had told him on Friday that my story about the lack of snow hadn’t quite been written yet. “I’m procrastinating,” I told him, Andrew seemed to admire my honesty, and admitted that he was pretty good at doing that to He had a bit of pride in his voice. Yes, it does lurk in the male psyche, So I understood him, I think. “You were right about the story,” Andrew said after greeting me M o nday morning. I gave him my usual dull look, and responded with “Huh?” “The snow!” he said. “Oh right, right,” I replied with a slow smile. This was David's last column. I chuckle to myself, I don't think this is one  he would have wanted to go out on...  This is one of my last pictures of David,  taken on a snow-less Christmas Eve  hike in Beaver Creek State Park. Later that winter hard snows came while I was alone and cau...

David Heiller The bees were first to welcome me home from vacation last week. They were buzzing so loudly on Thursday morning that I could hear them from 30 yards away. The air around one hive was a blizzard of bees. They were swarming; half the hive was following the queen in search of a new home. Jeez, leave for a week and a queen gets upset at you. The nerve! One angry chap even stung me by my left eye, which swelled shut long enough for Cindy to take this photo. The standing head for David's column looked a little different that week. An hour later, I returned to the hive. All was quiet again. I walked through the field and spotted a ball of bees hanging from the limb of a willow tree. That’s where the queen had landed to get her bearings. What a sight. There’s nothing as exciting as watching a swarm of bees, 40,000 strong, the size of your thigh, all huddled on top of one another, shimmering, humming, moving as one. (It’s also exciting to a penny-pinching German ...

David Heiller “Where the @#%* is the car?’’ A young woman growled that question as we made our way through the crowd at Pettibone Park on the Fourth of July. She had a couple kids in tow. My daughter, Malika, and I hurried past her. “Did you hear that?” Malika asked? “How could she talk like that in front of her kids?” I shook my head in the darkness. We had just watched some spectacular fireworks, but hearing that little cherry bomb of a verbal one took a little of the fun away. That lady had said a very serious swear word, at least in my mind. You can probably guess the word. It’s definitely not one you would expect to hear a mother use around her kids, But it seems like that is changing, that people are swearing more in public. I mentioned that to Malika. She told me about a group of people she had served at her job as a bartender a few days earlier. A group of people who swore like the proverbial longshoremen and they had their kids in tow. She was shocked and a...

David Heiller The Weather Woman on channel 10 was finishing her Saturday night report, while Cindy and I sat exhausted on the couch, half-watching, half-sleeping. Nothing could have got our attention except the words that Rhonda Grussendorf said next: “and there’s a chance of frost in the low-lying areas.” “Oh no, frost,” I groaned. Murphy’s Law, 14- C: The Night After You Plant Tomatoes, Frost Will Come. Collin working on the peas in a later  version of the Garden of Dreams...  because for us, they were ALL Gardens of Dreams. I looked at the outdoor thermometer: 52 degrees. “What do you think?” I asked Cindy. Last year we had a killing frost on June 10, and here it was only June 3. But the thought of covering tomatoes on Saturday night? Expletive deleted. “We can spray them with water in the morning before the sun hits them, that’s supposed to take care of frost damage,” Cindy said. She always says that on nights when frost may come. We were asleep...

David Heiller Saturday night, May 11, was a good night for mystery and suspense. Rain was falling, which helps any story lacking suspense, from Hill Street to Hemingway. The city of Askov lay quiet under the steady rain, and Cliff and Wilma Krogstad lay quiet in their bed as the rain pounded the roof. Cliff and Wilma don’t usually think about mystery and suspense at three in the morning, rain or no rain: They are usually too busy sleeping. But on May 11, Cliff heard a strange noise, and the mystery began. “Cliff and I were sleeping, and all of a sudden, we heard someone come in,” Wilma recalls. “We thought it was our son, going to bed. Then we heard him get up again.” Cliff stumbled bleary-eyed out of bed to investigate. He came back wide awake. “Boy mother, there’s a strange woman in the house,” Cliff said. “You should see the room, it’s a mess.” Mystery in Askov... You should have seen the woman. She was, ah, she didn’t have, well, she seemed to be lacking, um — t...

David Heiller It’s funny how we can get too much of a good thing. I’m thinking of the rain that has fallen lately. It started on Wednesday night, May 19, and really hasn’t stopped since then, and I’m writing on Sunday night, May 23. John's model? It’s getting to the point where John Holzwarth is sketching out plans for an ark, and Pastor Tony Fink is rounding up pairs of animals on the sly. I know, we needed the rain, the water table is low, people are starving in China. But enough is enough. I could predict it was coming though, and I’ll take a little credit (or blame). Here’s my theory. One: I planted grass seed on Wednesday afternoon, a lot of grass seed, $64 worth, all around the yard and over the geo-thermal field. It was a big project, aided I must add by my good neighbor Duane Thomford, who bladed and dragged the acre of ground just right. So after the grass seed and fertilizer were all scattered carefully in place, using the Farmers Co-op handy-dandy s...