Page Title

Huber

Funeral Home & Cremation Services

952-474-9595

Pediatric Rehabilitation Clinic.

Occupational Therapy. Speech Therapy.

952-443-9888

Victoria’s Corner Bar. Nightly Specials and Menus. 952-443-9944

Buying or Selling Victoria?

Call Nan Emmer. 612-702-2020

Specialized assisted living for those

with memory challenges.

Victoria. 952-908-2215

Weinzierl

Jewelers

8 First Street in Waconia. 952-442-2885

Preschool and Childcare in Victoria.

Call 952-443-2121.

MVT Excavating

No job is too small. 952-446-9341

The Key

The Key to advertisers

in the Victoria Gazette.

Located at www.VictoriaGazette.com.

Prairie Lawn & Garden

Service is what we sell. 952-937-2100

You people out there in Gazette Land have got to be the best bunch of readers and the best audience, with the best dispositions, that any newspaper could hope for. Your subscription checks have been flying into my Post Office Box 387 like flies to flypaper, which means as a group you’ve done a lot of envelope licking these past few weeks. Thank you from the bottom of my heart to the roof of your mouths. You do my soul good and I appreciate it.

Maybe some of you youngsters out there don’t know about flypaper. I bet my own kids find the term rather elusive, and I suggest that air conditioning in our homes caused the demise of that sticky strip of sweetness that could grab your hair if you weren’t careful.

Back in the old days, when Mom opened windows and doors of our country home to catch the prevailing breezes, we’d often catch a few flies too. Of course there were screens on those windows and doors, but those screens always seemed to develop little bigger holes here and there and those pesky flies would find those holes. We couldn’t find the holes, but the flies could.

A flyswatter was normally hung on a nail by the kitchen window and a strip of sticky flypaper decorated a space by the front door, which was really the back door but nobody used the real front door.

“There’s nothing dirtier than a fly!” Mom would say as she swatted one that landed near the butter dish. You never knew where a fly had been before it snuck into our house, but there were very nasty visiting places on a farm, like cow pies and such. Swat! Swat! Swat those flies!

Even in these modern times, various others members of the animal kingdom try to invade our homes and I don’t understand it. They’ve got the run of the wild, unending acres of forest and farm and vastness of valley, but they still seek something greener, sweeter, warmer, more abundant.

Yes, it sometimes appears that grass is greener on the other side of the fence -- or over the septic tank, according to the late Erma Bombeck. Why else would a mouse want to get into a house when it’s got the rest of the world at its pink little feet? The same goes for boxelder bugs and ladybugs and ants, also bats in the night and, I dare say, even a snake one time. Eeeek!

I’m reminded of the time that I spent living in Honolulu when I was attending graduate school at the University of Hawaii. There were no screens on our wide open to the air classrooms, where the wind and rain would blow in quicker than a fly. There were no screens in our apartment, either, yet we kept our windows open all night for a bit of coolness and air movement. There were no bugs to bother us, including no mosquitoes, but the next morning we’d find a reptile or two crawling on a wall. I don’t remember if we called them salamanders or chameleons or geckos or something else, but I do remember they were harmless.

I guess we Minnesotans don’t mind too much the critter trouble every spring as the first thing we do is open our windows and doors and let the fresh air inside. We breathe deep and widen our nostrils at the moist coolness that replaces the dead dryness of winter. We call it fresh air, and yet it has probably been around the world several times before it gets to our own home. Here in Victoria, I think the fresh air blows in from the Rocky Mountains and the Dakota Prairies before it gets to us. Sometimes it comes to Victoria, Minnesota, directly from Ghent, Minnesota. That’s what my mom says, anyhow.

One thing I don’t do is hang our bedsheets outdoors on a clotheslines in order to capture springtime. For one thing, I don’t have a clothesline. But some of you Victoria residents do. I’ve seen your sheets fluttering by your flowers. Well, that’s going overboard, in my opinion. We sleep with our windows open all night and that brings in enough fresh air until the hot sticky days of summer arrive.

Good grief, Charlie Brown, how did I get all the way from the sticky part of subscription envelopes to the sticky part of summer? I just wanted to say thank you for your thoughtfulness and generosity. Thank you.