She didn’t look like much — a heap of branches, gnarled and worn; Her wood was split and rotten from the winters and the storm. While carting off the broken wood a sadness came to me: It’s not a pile of junk. This once was Grandma’s apple tree. How many times she warmed our house with smells of baking pie, And cinnamon and apple sauce, and holidays gone by. Why did we have to cut her down? We’d given little thought; Her fruit was less abundant now, and pies were mostly bought. The time it took to slice her with a chainsaw wasn’t long, But years thereafter, still I felt that something there was wrong. I wondered what a lesson from this episode might give, And if it’s only trees that have to
Born: August 20, 1911 in Minneapolis, Minnesota Died: October 24, 1942 in Lake Osakis, Minnesota The Funeral I got up as high on my tippy-toes as possible to look into the casket. It was Daddy, all right—pale, motionless, with his big hands crossed on his stomach. As a 4-1/2-year-old boy in 1942, I knew nothing of death. I was just able to reach his cold right hand. I lifted it up a few inches and it flopped back down. I was surprised at the stiffness of my 31-year-old daddy. It was all so weird—him wearing a suit and tie for the first time in my memory, lying on a bed of white satin. Daddy was surrounded by wreaths with silk banners and garlands of flowers that filled the Henry W. Anderson Mortuary with overpowering fragrances. I didn’t know how to behave. Almost everybody else was crying. My 5-1/2-year old sister
“It’s working!” I shouted gleefully, gently swirling the test tube over the kitchen stove burner. The yellowish liquid was starting to bubble fiendishly. “Woah, what a stink!” said my sidekick, Westen, plugging his nostrils. “Just like the smell of rotten eggs,” said the manual to my new Gilbert Chemistry Set which I’d saved up seven dollars to buy from Jimmy Williams, my neighbor on Longfellow Avenue in south Minneapolis. “Put some sulfur in a test tube and some candle wax, gently heat over a flame and you get hydrogen sulfide.” Now my life had changed. As a seven-year-old boy, small for his age, I suddenly had POWER (and a career in chemistry). My mother stormed into the kitchen and shrieked, “What is that god-awful smell?” “It’s hydrogen sulfide,” I said proudly. She was not impressed. “I’ve got people coming over in an hour, and you better get rid of that
