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Lightning changes

The lightning bolt that shot from the sky more than four decades ago was a signal that everything was about to change. I was a young dairyman, struggling to scratch out a living on the rundown farm I had leased a few miles south of Brookings. I was doing chores with my Farmall “M” one summer morning when I espied a glowering thunderhead a few miles north. An incandescent blue spark flickered from cloud to ground. Moments later, I felt the thunderclap deep in my chest. “Somebody’s having a bad day,” I thought. The lightning struck an aging house that had been converted ...

You are reading Weeds300

Recently, I wrote about numbers. There is an allure to big, round numbers. Witness the fuss we made about the 100th anniversary of Babe Ruth’s visit to Sleepy Eye. Three hundred qualifies as a big number. You are looking at “Weeds300.” That is displayed on my computer screen in the Word program I use to cobble words together. When I began doing these for The Journal eleven years ago, I made the regrettable decision to label them “Weeds1,” “Weeds2,” etc. I say regrettable because it is a terrible way to catalog columns. If I want to find something I wrote ten years ago, ...

Keeping Minnesotans safe from ‘the silent killer’

This holiday season, as temperatures drop and we gather with loved ones, it’s important to keep safety front of mind. Yes, that means driving more carefully on icy roads, but it also means keeping your family safe from a less obvious winter hazard — carbon monoxide. According to the Minnesota Department of Health, carbon monoxide killed 119 Minnesotans between 2012 and 2021. Young children and adults over 65 are especially vulnerable. The most common symptoms — often described as “flu-like” — include headache, dizziness, weakness, upset stomach, vomiting, chest pain, and ...

Liberty Park: a jewel of green space in the heart of Marshall

Liberty Park in Marshall is more than just a plain old park, and that’s because of how it stands out as a special place. It’s my favorite of all the city’s parks, even though I like them all. Independence Park is the largest. Legion Field has the baseball stadium. Freedom Park was built near my parent’s house when I was a small child. Still Liberty Park became my favorite as I grew up. It’s now a pleasant part of my walking route around my neighborhood. It has a nice playground area for kids, some square picnic tables, the gazebo, mature trees and the river. Its ...

A new/old shop

It’s been said that many overnight successes take 10 years. But if you are a slow study like me, it can take much, much longer. In 1990, Dad and I decided that our dairy farm needed a shop. We chose a likely spot on the farmstead and said, “This looks good. Let’s build it here.” That’s pretty much the same system my ancestors used when they homesteaded. We hired a local carpenter to help us lay out the building site. In our spare time — between milking the cows, caring for the livestock, and crop farming — Dad and I began work on the new building. Progress was slow. ...

It’s all about the numbers

In a town like Sleepy Eye, everyone is a farmer. If you’re not farming or working for one of the ag businesses, you’re probably only a generation removed from a farm. Since we’re all farmers, I get asked a lot how it’s going during harvest. I had this line about soybeans. “Before harvest, I hoped for fifty bushels per acre. Then I heard people were getting seventy. We got sixty and I was depressed.” My tongue-in-cheek observation fits the stereotype of farmers never being completely happy. Happiness is like alcohol; you don’t want to get too intoxicated. At the end ...