Behind the Lines: by David Heiller

Editors note: Click here for the original and true song...   This must have the melody from the old Johnny Cash song: “I’ve Been Everywhere” playing in your head in order to make any sense of this. David wrote it for the staff Christmas party in 1990, and sang it every Christmas party thereafter. He also sang it to hoots at the variety show most Rutabaga Festivals. Pronounciation is key, so I will give a few clues for non-northern Pine County types who actually want to try to read this: Trygve: Trigvee, Lunde: Lundee, Krabbe: Crabbie, Bagge: Baggee, Kukuk: Cookoo, Klocke: Clockee, Loew: Low. In the end though, I know the song, and the names, and the people, and I don’t know how David managed to actually sing this! But he did. ~chg A song for Hazel: She calls everywhere David Heiller Hazel Serritslev writes the Askov news for the Askov American, and she writes it well, in my humble opinion. Sometimes people bring news items in, or call her with ...

David Heiller I couldn’t quite believe it when I stepped onto the deck on Saturday morning. It was like seeing an old fr iend in a crowd. Wow, Hello. How are you! I shook the rug over the top of the railing, then draped it there to freshen it up. And I draped myself there too, leaning back, eyes closed. The sun felt warm, the breeze off the river just so ft and fr esh enough to bring a fl eeting thought to mind. Spring. We a ll receive that first hint of spring in different ways, but mine is sure-fire. I walked into the house, grabbed my fiddle, and returned to my spot. The fiddle almost played itself, first a familiar waltz, then a new tune, one that escapes me as I write this a day later, but one that had the new season as its theme. David and his fiddle A little later Cindy and I took a walk to the old Oesterle farm across the road. It’s one of our favorite walks. The ground was still hard from a night in the high twenties. But the snow was patchy enough for u...

David Heiller A lot of thoughts come to mind when I try to pin down my favorite farm story. There was the time my cousin, Donise, sat on a bumblebee. It stung her in a rather awkward spot, and swelled up like a plum. Once the pain stopped and the tears dried, she proudly showed her badge of courage to everyone around. She was about 10 years old at the time. Haying in North Dakota. A Schnick family photo. Another memory is when my Uncle Donny tricked me. (I should say one of the many times when he tricked me.) We were pulling a hay wagon down from a hay field on the ridge above his valley farm. Donny had two iron wedges that he would put in front of the steel-rimmed wagon wheels. This would help slow the wagon as we crawled down the steep hill, tractor in low gear and me hanging for dear life on top of five layers of hay bales. 0ne time, when we got to the bottom of the hill safely, Donny backed the wagon off the wedges, and ran his hand over the smooth wedge, ...

David Heiller Doing the laundry had always been my wife’s job in our house, until her mother’s illness took my wife away for days at a time and I had to become the laundry person. Temporarily. It’s been an interesting test, and one that I haven’t passed with fl ying colors. If any color comes to mind, it is red. Rut-Roh! That’s lesson number one in Introduction to Laundry : Don’t put a red bandana in with a load of lights. Cindy always has two piles of laundry going in the laundry room, one white and one dark. Even when all the laundry is done and folded, she’ll put out a call for dirty laundry, and a pile is scraped together from the kids’ room and under the beds and from the bathroom, where a towel that looks perfectly clean to me has been used one too many times. Cindy can tell these things. I have never believed in the merits of separating darks and whites. And since the laundry room also doubles as the sewing room and the pantry in our house, I thought I could ...

David Heiller Joe hopped in the truck and headed to school on Monday morning. Α fine mist had fallen in the early morning hours, and was still sifting down. It had frozen on the windshield, and coated the roads with an almost invisible layer of ice. "Joe" and a different red truck. Joe wasn’t thinking about much as he drove to school. Not until he hit the icy patch. He figured he was going about 55 miles an hour when that happened and he was suddenly out of control. Is there anything more frightening than losing control of a vehicle? Joe didn’t think so. His heart felt like it was going to come out of his shirt. It all happened so fast. The tail of the truck swung around and clipped the  Hillbrand mailbox, sending it over two barbed wire fences like a Kent Hrbek homerun. Then the truck shot to the other side of the road like a pinball. Α utility pole whizzed past, just inches away. Here comes the ditch! Α small tree shattered, its top falling on the hood. ...

David Heiller Alice Dracy, Bruno, called the American office last Friday to tell about her son, Steve, and her daughter, Diane, and something they now share. The story is worth sharing, too. Steven Dracy, lifted from the newspaper. On Jan. 12, Steven, who lives in Sandstone, donated one of his kidneys to his sister, Diane Dracy Buehre, at the Methodist Hospital in Rochester. “Diane was diagnosed with kidney disease as a child and her condition had progressed to the point that a transplant was necessary,” Mrs. Dracy said. Her kidneys were removed on November 22. Diane’s three brothers, Steve, Dennis, and Ron, all volunteered to donate a kidney to their sister. (Doctors prefer donated kidneys from living relatives when possible.) Tests of the three brothers showed perfect compatibility between Diane and Steve. “I was like an identical twin, seven years later,” said Steve, 29. “Our chromosomes were a 100 percent match.” Steve admitted that he was startled about the o...

David Heiller “All right, that’s enough.” The top Tupperware drawer wouldn’t close. Plastic lids and dishes of all description lay in a jumbled heap. Some had fallen onto the fl oor. I pulled out the drawer, set it on the counter and took everything out. I put the round dishes together, and the square ones together, the rectangular and rhomboid ones together too. The lids, few of which seemed to match the shapes of said containers, went into a large bin of their own. Then it was the same with the bottom drawer. Bottles were rejoined with their lids and placed in the back. Old Rubbermaid friends were reunited. Everything went back in place. The drawers miraculously had a lot of room to spare, and they shut just fine. The whole process took about five minutes. “Wow, thanks,” Cindy said with true appreciation in her voice. Nuts and screw and bolts and what-not: Davids organizational bug-a-boo. Something was going on here, I thought to myself. Just one late-December day...