Behind the Lines: by David Heiller

David Heiller Bring in the firewood fr om the woods, split stack it, and cover it. Α good job to do with y o ur son, although the son might not agree. All right, so maybe we weren't always ready for winter. No time to rake up the debris around the woodpile. Maybe later. Close up the greenhouse. It’s been open at both ends since last spring. Make a note to fix the broken pane. No time to do it now. Extract the honey fr om the 19 frames of honey comb that have been sitting in the sauna for a month. They contain 3-3/4 gallons of honey. Put the empty frames by the bee hives, for the bees to clean up. Nothing goes to waste with bees. But I get most of their honey. It’s good in a cup of tea every morning. Disconnect the hose from the house. Put all the hoses in the basement. How did I ever get this many hoses? Four of them. I’m a man who’s rich in hoses. Put the canoe paddle away, and the frog net too. They are lying by the pond. Mollie and I caught lots of frogs wit...

 David Heiller Before Cindy and I had children, we decided to get a puppy. We joked that it would be a good child-rearing test for us. (There’s a lot of truth to that joke.) We even named the dog Binti, which means “my daughter” in Arabic, which I spoke from my Peace Corps experience. Our first day with Binti. Binti was part of our family back then, nine years ago. She slept on the couch, or in our bed. When we visited relatives for holidays or weekends, she came along. We took her for walks every day, and played many games. One of the best games we played was on the big round bales of hay in the field near our rented farm house. Cindy and I would climb onto a bale, with Binti leaping to join us. Then we would race to the next bale, trying to keep ahead of the imaginary alligator. At first, Binti couldn’t catch us, but as the autumn progressed, we became alligator casserole nearly every night. When our real children started arriving, Binti’s life changed. She was...

David Heiller The hum from the bee hive rose to a roar as I lifted the lid off and puffed them with smoke. A stiff breeze swirled through the trees. Don’t work with bees on a windy day, the bee books say, but bees never could read very well. David and the hives . Besides, it was October 2, and I was about one month late in doing this job. Wind or no wind, I was going to take that honey. I squeezed the bellows of the smoker, sending more thick smoke down into the hive. The bees buzzed their disapproval, but most of them retreated into the hive. Smoke confuses them and sends them running to protect their queen. I couldn’t blame the bees for grumbling. They had worked hard for that extra box of honey. I lifted nine frames from the box on top. I used a hive tool, which is like a small crowbar, and a gripping tool to pry out each frame. They didn’t come out easily. In addition to weighing a couple pounds, each one was glued into place by bee glue, otherwise known as propo...

David Heiller When I come home from work, I am always greeted by our two dogs, Ida and MacKenzie. . They have different personalities. Ida, age seven, is part collie and part flugel-hound (a little bit of everything). And she is shy. If Ida were a teenage girl at a dance, she would try to blend in with the wallpaper. She probably wouldn’t dance if you asked her. Queen Ida, David, and MacKenzie. Mack, on the other hand, would be the life of the party. She would be doing the Mack-areena. She is a three-year-old Australian shepherd, friendly and playful, with a coat like silk. Her nickname is Happy. You couldn’t find two dogs more different than Mack and Ida. But they have one thing in common. They both are fun to talk to. That’s the subject I am getting at here: talking to your dog. It’s one of life’s simplest pleasures. When I get home from work, I often drop my briefcase and camera on the grass and lie down and let the dogs crowd around me. That’s when they are mo...

David Heiller Last week I asked Hazel Serritslev, who work; at the American, if she needed any green beans. Hazel is 74 years old, so she qualifies for garden give-aways. Hazel said yes, but she was going out of town so she wouldn’t have a chance to use them. No problem. I called Leone Schultz of Finlayson. She is 89, and this is the first year that she hasn’t had a big garden. She said yes, she could use the beans. She stopped in to pick them up on Friday, August 18, and said a sincere thank you. A little broccoli to put-up, eat-up  and give-away. And there will be more! “Can you use some tomatoes?” I asked. She said she could, and this Friday she will stop in again and pick up some tomatoes, if I remember to bring them. Palmer Dahl stopped in on Sunday to drop off a screwdriver that he had re-ground for me. Palmer is 86, so I figured I could pawn off some vegetables on him. But he is a man of simple means, and more blunt than Hazel and Leone. (No of...

David Heiller My mother, my wife, and I took a trip to Sherwood and Mohall, in northwestern North Dakota, last week. Mom wanted to visit her aunt Clara, who is in a nursing home in Mohall. An old Schnick photo from North Dakota. David's grandma, Stella is holding the horse on the far right. Aunt Clara is the youngest one in the front of the photo Cindy and I wanted to see Clara too, but more than that we wanted to see where Mom was born and raised. We wanted to get a feel for the place, and we did. Mom took us to Sherwood first. We drove along Highway 28. She was looking for the house where her mother lived. She had stayed there when she was a girl, and rode the school bus to Sherwood. “There’s nothing here now,” she warned. Mom told us again how Grandpa had come out here from Minnesota and worked the harvests. How he met Grandma. She told us lots of stories about the old days on this trip. Trips back home are good for that. You don’t feel so foolish a sking al...

David Heiller Last Tuesday was Murphy’s birthday. You know Murphy, of Murphy’s Law fame. He celebrates his birthday every few weeks here at American Publishing. Two months ago, he had a grand birthday celebration in our basement. The sky darkened like dusk, and an inch of rain fell in half an hour. Murphy was sitting in the drainpipe to the rear of the building, so that the rain water couldn’t go through. It flowed over the rear door sill, and into the basement, where we have $12,000 worth of paper stored. It pooled up under the presses, formed lakes over the drain. Tuesday was layout day for the paper. It was a long jigsaw puzzle. All done by hand. Unless of course Murphy was around for the day, then all bets were off! I took off my shoes and shirt, and dug into the ground outside, while the rain soaked me. I found a broken tile of clay drain pipe, where Murphy had been dancing. After an hour, the water finally started flowing through, the lake in the basement recede...