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Well, it's been a quiet week in Lake Wobegon, my hometown, just the sound of things growing up there. It's a magnificent spring. I've said it before. I'll say it again. It's the most beautiful spring I've ever seen in Minnesota, and I have been here for 43 years. Everything blooming all at once. Everything just happening at the same time. Green and damp and beautiful. The flowering crabapple tree up in the backyard of the Dieners, Harold and Marlis, suddenly burst into bloom this last week. A tree that had been standing there, unnoticed, wearing its bathrobe, suddenly... when everyone was looking in another direction threw its bathrobe off and stood there naked and purple and trembling and revealing all of its innermost flowers the most beautiful tree in town in one of the ugliest yards the diners have a bunch of children including Becky Diener, who was sitting up in her bedroom on Tuesday. The tree burst into bloom on Monday. Was sitting up in her room trying to finish a 750-word personal essay for Miss Melrose's English class on the topic, Describe your backyard as if you were seeing it for the first time. Which didn't make any sense to Becky at all. If you had never seen it before, then you would have grown up someplace else. And you would be somebody else, not yourself. And how could you know who this person would be? But she tried. And after about an hour and 10 minutes of hard work with a ballpoint pen on wide-ruled paper, She had 39 words on this topic. Which, she figured, needing 750, if she worked straight through the night, she would finish at about 1.45 p.m. on Wednesday. Which, even if it were a brilliant essay, would be about two and a half hours too late. and she would flunk the course. She imagined seeing this backyard after being gone for a long time, say maybe 10 years from now, when she returned to town in a white Cadillac convertible, sitting up on the canvas above the back seat, driving slowly, being driven slowly down Main Street under the great canvas banner that said, Welcome, Becky. as cameras snapped and flashbulbs and as she pulled up in front of her old house and said to reporters, that's where I used to sit when I was a little girl under that flowering crabapple tree and dreamed that I was a Chinese princess. And they said, who? of all of your teachers was the most important to you growing up. And Becky looked and saw the face of an old woman in the crowd, Miss Melrose, saying, Choose me, please, save me. And Becky said, oh, there were so many. It's hard to say, to pick out just one. There was one teacher, I remember, who taught English. A woman, I forget her name. As the old woman whispered from the crowd, please, please say me, Miss Malrose. She turned back to her essay. She wrote, the most interesting thing in my backyard is a flowering crab apple tree which was planted by my father when I was six years old on a day after he... She crumpled that up. how well I remember when I was six years old and the day when my father said my father was not a person who became excited easily and so it was unusual on that spring day ten years ago when he When I was six years old, I Well, the story of that flowering crabapple tree is an interesting story. I'm not sure if you could tell it in 750 words, but he planted that. Harold planted that in 1976, which was about seven years after he and Marlis were married. They were married, I believe, in 1966. Sixty-nine, sixty-eight, or sixty-nine. I wasn't invited to their wedding, so I can't say for sure. Harold and Marlis grew up across the street, down the block from each other, in Lake Wobegon, and were... Friends, since they were little children, liked each other tremendously, and as they got a little bit older, were in love, I guess. If you can be in love when you were 13, 14, 15, 16 years old as children, they were sort of in love. At least they looked at each other an awful lot. Every chance they got, they looked at. One looked at the other. As our parents did, I suppose, at some point, each of us, our parents, as they say, you know, when you were just a gleam in your parents' eyes. Well, that's when it was, when they couldn't take their eyes off each other. Marlis used to go over and sit and talk with Harold's mother in Medina's backyard and sit and shell peas and snap beans with her sitting in the backyard so that she, Marlis, could look at Harold some more as he worked in the garden as a boy and as he mowed the lawn. She watched him. And then he would go into the house and she would sit and wait for him to come back out. And of course he'd gone inside so that he could look out through the window and stare at her. Two of them just looking at each other all those years. Marlis went over to visit the Diener house to get away from home because her father was a lost cause and known as such, a lost cause like the Confederacy, like the search for the Northwest Passage. He was a lost cause who had been prayed over and spoken over and hoped for and fought for by so many fine people for so long and then finally they just gave up on him. No matter what they did, he sat and listened and then reached for the bottle and he said, drink too much? He said, I don't know what you're talking about. And it was true, he didn't. So Marlis grew up looking on her father as kind of a clown and buffoon and ridiculous man and was watching Harold Diener to see if he was the same or if he was a better person and was in love with him as best she could be until one day when Harold would have been about 17 years old she went over to his house to a party And late in the evening, after Harold and his friends had drunk beer by the fistful and were dizzy and foolish, and suddenly Harold said to his friends, he said, light me. And he lay back on his back and lifted his legs up in the air, and one of his friends lit a match and held it to Harold's rear end, and a blue flame shot out. And Marlis looked at him in disgust and she turned around and walked out the front door and she didn't speak to him for two years after that. Didn't speak to him for two years. And Harold just about went crazy for those two years. especially after Marlis graduated from high school and she went to work in the bank and she started keeping company with a young man who'd come to teach school in Lake Wobegon. He was a geography teacher and his name was Stu. He was tall and he was dark-haired. He combed his hair up into a magnificent pile in front, into a beautiful pompadour. And he was educated, having graduated from St. Cloud Normal College. And he subscribed to Time magazine and was... Elegant and had a fine baritone voice, cut a fine figure, and more than that, he was an aviator. He flew a red Piper Cub. When he wasn't walking up and down the streets of Lake Wobegon with Marlis, Stu was flying his Piper Cub over her house. Now, Lake Wobegon did not have a flying strip at the time, so he had to keep his plane in St. Cloud at the airstrip. And when Stu got in his car to drive to St. Cloud, that was about the only time that Harold could get in a word with Marlis and would go over to her house and try and talk some sense into her head. And he could talk to her for a while and then would hear the buzz of Stu's Red Piper Club coming over the horizon. and for the next half hour he treated her and everyone else to a show of aerial acrobatics and dives and spins and flying upside down and winding up with the grand finale as he cut back on the throttle and came in low over her house and leaned out of the cockpit and sang Red Sails in the Sunset. Marla stood in the backyard shielding her eyes with her hand as he flew overhead singing to her from his airplane and said to Harold, isn't he marvelous? Isn't he just marvelous? Harold said yes as inside his heart he prayed for God to make the plane crash. Oh, yes. Yes, he's a wonderful person, he said, as he thought to himself, die, die. Well, I guess Marlis was 19 or 20. One spring, she was the head of the annual spring couples club sweetheart banquet at Lake Wobegon Lutheran Church in charge of putting together the dinner. Now, the year before, Irene Holm had been in charge of the dinner, Marlis' archenemy, and had produced a magnificent dinner of roast lamb, the first time it had ever been seen in such quantity in that town. And so Marlis was trying to think of how she could beat Irene's time and decided she would have a roast beef dinner, but with morel mushrooms. Now morel mushrooms are a great delicacy in Lake Wobegon and everywhere in Minnesota and are found only in the wild by people who have to go out in the woods and search high and low for them and usually low. Tramping sometimes 12, 15, and 20 miles through the woods to find the spots around dead elm trees where morel mushrooms grow. In spots that people keep secret and would never confess to anyone, not even on their deathbed to a priest. So for Marlis to serve morel mushrooms at a church banquet... was the utmost in extravagance, like having diamonds as party favors, except she had to find them first. And she mentioned it to Stu, and she mentioned it to Harold, and she sat back, and she waited. Well, Harold had been out in the woods searching for morel mushrooms before and thought he knew of a place where there were some dead elm trees that had been dead long enough but not too long to be just right for there to be morel mushrooms around in that area. and he put on his camouflage outfit, and he headed out of town on foot, heading in the wrong direction, naturally, to throw people off, and walked a few miles, and then was about to circle around when he heard footsteps behind him. other morellists on the trail following him and so had to go farther and farther in the wrong direction so as not to reveal this secret place where he thought there was a treasure trove of the wily morell. Had to go farther and farther in the wrong direction until it was late and long after dark and he did not get back home until about six o'clock in the morning and went straight to bed and went to sleep. and was awakened about noon by the sound of a Piper Cub flying over the town low and immediately thought to himself, Stu, he can spot dead elm trees from the air and find them. And then his ground crew come out and locate the Morels and this sweetheart's banquet going to turn into their engagement dinner unless I do something. He got dressed fast and headed out. Well, Stu came over town low and he saw some people waving to him and he couldn't resist the temptation to try and land in Lake Wobegon. He picked out a spot in the Talarud's pasture and he headed in for it and circled around and came in low and Marlis watching from her backyard saw him disappear beneath the line of trees and thought to herself, oh no, he's going to crash. She screamed. They all headed for the spot. A hundred people went over there as fast as they could, expecting to find the young hero, his body lying torn and bleeding in the wet grass, dying with perhaps just a few hundred dying words on his lips. and drove and ran over there in behind the trees and there was the plane in the pasture and Stu standing next to it, smiling, tall and handsome, his wife's white scarf around his neck and his flying helmet, his leather flying helmet in his hand. Standing brave and tall by his red plane, they all flocked over through the mud and stood around his plane as he explained to them how he would find the morels from the air. And then could not resist speaking a little bit longer. and did not notice Harold in the crowd move around behind him and stand by the plane. Stu spoke about his childhood and about Charles A. Lindbergh. And how flying had always been a dream to him. Not noticing what Harold was doing and not noticing the people in the crowd who were laughing at what Harold was doing. Stu was inspired. Laughter meant nothing to him. You talked about how, as an aviator, he had always dreamed of flying off to distant lands, but that once he got up in the air, he could see so clearly there was no place in the world so beautiful as Lake Wobegon, this little jewel beside the blue waters and more road apples of this nature. And at last, having finished his speech with a wave of his hand, he turned towards the plane and got in and started it up as Harold turned the propeller for him once, twice, and then it caught, and the engine started up and Stu flapped his flaps and adjusted his goggles and gave a wave to the audience and gunned his engines a little bit. But the ground was wet where his wheels were parked and while he had been talking, Harold had made the ground even a little bit more wet. so that the wheels were sunk down and Stu eased the throttle a little harder and the plane creaked a little bit and he gave it a little more gas and the plane pitched forward and stood on its head. And suddenly he saw the ground come up towards him as the propeller sank down into wet mud making a sound like a man who's eaten too many green apples. And... then stopped and all was silent and the door opened and Stu got out looking as dignified as he could and as studious as he could manage despite the fact that he was tilting a little bit to the east and starting to fade and Harold said out loud, Stu, he said, we didn't ask you to get those mushrooms sliced And stew toppled over into the mud. Harold came back about three hours later with 500 morel mushrooms and a sprig of flowering crabapple, which he gave to Marlis and asked her to marry him. And eventually she said that she would. Now the flowering crabapple tree is what I was talking about. was not planted until they'd been married about six years. And some of the shine had worn off their marriage, and some kids came along and wore a little more gloss off it. And one afternoon, Harold, out in the backyard with the family, trying to impress his children and trying to make them laugh and trying to make Marlis laugh and maybe impress her too, was up on the garage roof nailing some shingles down and one thing led to another and who knows how these things happen, pretended that he could fly. and stood on the gutter of the eaves and flapped his wings and jumped and landed in the mud and turned his ankle and fell and lay there and all the kids ran up to him and said, ''Oh, Daddy. Oh, poor Daddy, are you hurt?'' And Marlis looked down at him and said, ''You are ridiculous. You are ridiculous.'' That was the afternoon that Harold got the root of a crab apple tree. He dug it out and he got a straight branch off a flowering crab apple and brought them home. And there in the spot where he had landed, he dug a little hole and he put the root down and with his hatchet he sharpened the end of the branch and then he split the tip of the root that extended up and he said children he said here is going to be a tree and he stuck the sharp branch down into the cleft of the split root and he wedged it in tight and he wound a cloth around it and he said, that is going to be a tree. And Marlis said, don't be ridiculous. They said, is it really going to be a tree, Dad? He said, yes. there is going to be a tree. And he watered it, and he tended it, and more than that, every night for weeks, after dark, after everyone had gone to bed, he came out and leaned down and said to it, Grow! Grow! You grow! The graft And that branch grew. And the next year, it was kind of interesting looking. And the year after that, it was very impressive. And the year after that, it was wonderful. And the year after that, it was magnificent. And that's how the tree came to be in the Diener's backyard. Some backyards are more impressive when you see them for the first time But a few backyards, including the one that I come from, are more impressive when you've seen them for years and years and years. That' the news from Lake Wobegon. Where all the women are strong, all the men are good-looking, all the children are above average.
GK's poem to spring. Program for the PBS station.
1986.05.04 Star Tribune / rebroadcast on June 3, 1989.
Archival contributors: Frank Berto