last windrow

You go from your house to your garage leaning into the wind with your ear-flappers pulled down. Your car battery barely provides enough "juice" to turn your pickup's starter. The road in front of you on your way to the coffee shop is full of hard-packed ice and you meet a snowplow...

There weren't many "brew pubs" where I came from. The idea of brewing beer to make a living would have been foreign to us. We made our living from picking corn or harvesting wheat or combining oats. Things have changed. It seems today that the art of making beer has become a national...

We who live in the Northland feel a certain sympathy for our brothers and sisters in the Boston and New England area this winter. We know how it feels to experience a never-ending winter. We've been there. It's a good thing the pilgrims aren't landing on Plymouth Rock this winter. The...

Miss Goulasha was a flaming red head. She had big, brown eyes and she smelled good. She was my third-grade teacher and it was Valentine's week at my small community school. There was no doubt that I had a crush on this woman. She was everything a third-grade boy could want in a potential...

I don't care what anyone says, Groundhog Day is the real first official day of spring. Even though I know that up here on the northern tier a blizzard can be around any corner, when that furry rodent pokes his nubby little head out of his wintertime burrow, the wind becomes a little...

This past Saturday saw a mass of people clad in snowsuits, carrying buckets while striding confidently out to what is called the Brainerd Jaycees Ice Fishing Extravaganza on Gull Lake. It's a treat just to stand there and witness the various ways humans choose to challenge the northern...

If they'd had reality TV shows when I was growing up, I'd have made a million dollars. Well, maybe hundreds of thousands of dollars; well, maybe they'd have paid me my mileage to the studio. I and many others lived a reality TV farm life. My wife and I were recently viewing...

I didn't think much about holding public office as I was pulling cockleburrs up by their roots in those Iowa cornfields of my youth. There wasn't a thought about taxes, budgets, zoning issues or citizen complaints as I was dispatching sunflower roots from the soil. I lived a relatively...

This is the winter of a Minnesota sports lover's discontent. There are no more bright horizons on our screen. We have slumped into the depths of January with only a faint glimmer of hope for the coming year. Why do I no longer get upset when a Minnesota sports team bites the dust?...

The following Last Windrow "Classic" column was written in 1990 when my daughter was 5 years old.

Adolf was going to get a bull for Christmas. Jack and Tom were brothers who lived in the creases of the western Iowaloess hills. They had settled in a valley surrounded by high hills during the early 1900s. They worked together to clear the flat bottom land and pasture the steep...

Christmas trees were few and far between on the slopes and valleys of northwestern Iowa, where I grew up. The trees I was familiar with were cottonwoods, ash, box elder and Chinese elm trees, for the most part. None of them would make much of a Christmas tree, although I'd bet they...

No venison roast will be adorning our table this Thanksgiving Day. No deer with antlers ever entered my rifle scope during the three-weekend season in my part of the world. Not that anyone would really complain about not having venison roast for Thanksgiving. Some of my beloved relatives...

October 20, 1908 - Sold Herman Lang 105 pounds of beef at .06 a pound, total $6.30. October 21, 1908 - Sold Frank Luksan 95 pounds of beef at .07 cents a pound, total $6.65. December 1908 - got 25 cents worth of Christmas candy and 50 cents worth of apples from George Young,...

If you were looking for a nice, warm Minnesota deer hunting opener, you didn't get it this year. The oak leaves shook above my head at 9 a.m. Saturday morning, opening day of the Minnesota deer season. It was not from a squirrel looking for a nut; it was because my stand was partially...