This time around we had 30 wonderful entries, from all over the state, on all sorts of topics. We thank all of you who submitted to our second contest.

The winners are:

1st Place: "Nanabozho" by Bart Galle

2nd Place: "The Drama Of Others" by Susan Gray

3rd Place: "The Engineer And The Artist Series: The Golden Gate Bridge" by Marsha C. Porter

Honorable Mention: "Birch" by Thomas Kendrick

Honorable Mention: "Dirty Dishes" by Christine Krueger

Congratulations to all!

Our judges had to make difficult choices, and we thank these folks for their wisdom and generosity: Madonna Cechota, Elizabeth Healy, Thomas Kendrick, Donna Malum, Sharon Sparks, and Bonnie West.

We thank all the MinnPost readers who support the writings of fellow Minnesotans.

For the next three Mondays, we will post the winning pieces. Today it's our pleasure to begin with "Birch" by Thomas Kendrick and "Dirty Dishes" by Christine Krueger.


"Birch" by Thomas Kendrick

This morning I drove down to the old pasture above Crystal Springs. It had been forty-some years since I'd been there — as a seven-year-old I had gathered firewood from this pasture with my father — and the place has plenty of memories for me.

As my wife and I picked our way along the muddied cow path in the pasture, we saw the birch trees that are almost certainly descendants of the very birch branches my father and I had claimed. The pasture was unchanged by time, and the memories came back forcefully. In my mind I was again seven, and I half expected to see my father come up out of the gulley wearing a broad smile, clutching a large branch of birch, as if the intervening years had only been a dream, or a bad memory.

I was ten when my father died, but hardly a day passes that I don't think of him. He had cancer but we were forbidden to discuss it. A willful and fervent Catholic, he thought that to have even broached the subject of his own death would have been tantamount to giving up and losing faith.

My mother told us to "storm heaven with your prayers." There must've been a racket in heaven those days, with fourteen children and an almost-widow thundering Our Fathers and Hail Marys skyward. Prayer was our only weapon, and we wielded it desperately.

But our storm never reached heaven. It circled around like a deadly boomerang and roared homeward. We might as well have been sand castles on the beach. It's been forty-odd years and I would exaggerate to say that I have fully recovered.

My most poignant memory was the day I held the door open for the EMTs as they carried my semi-conscious father out. As he passed me I spoke to him — silently, of course, for such words were forbidden. "Goodbye, Daddy," I said. I would never see him again.

"He's gone," I muttered absently. I stooped to pick up a small birch branch lying at my feet.

I felt my wife at my arm.

"He's gone," I repeated, as if he'd just left.

I considered the stick in my hand. "But I have my memory," I smiled wistfully at her. "And this lovely little branch."

We turned toward the road, slid carefully under the barbed wire fence, started the car, and headed home.

Thomas Kendrick is a second grade teacher in St. Paul and a graduate of the University of Minnesota. He starts his day at 4 a.m. with a hot cup of English Breakfast tea. He enjoys cooking, song-writing, and word play. His favorite authors include Homer, Loren Eiseley and Dr. Seuss.

 
"Dirty dishes" by Christine Krueger

She was at the Detroit airport when he called on her cell, catching her there on the twenty-second hour of a twenty-four hour turn-around flight to Amsterdam. Her feet ached, her hip hurt and she was tired from pushing the cart down the narrow aisles of the 747, serving food on plastic dishes and retrieving trash from petty passengers. She held the phone in her left hand, fingered the split ends of her long brown hair between her right thumb and forefinger while she listened to his words.

"I think I'm having a heart attack," he said.

She could see him, hundreds of miles away in Minneapolis, right hand on his chest, rubbing it gently counter clockwise as if to conjure the pain to a space outside his body.

Her forehead furrowed, she thought of the thirty years they had shared. The anniversaries, birthdays, holidays, births of children, meetings with principals, bounced checks, shared meals. She saw the home they'd built, the green couch, his canvases stretched on frames in the living room, opened cereal boxes on the kitchen counter, unpaid bills on the dining room table, dirty dishes lying in the sink. She imagined a point ten minutes from now, paramedics picking steps between the ginger colored cats to clear a space for the AED, the gurney with a warm clean blanket and she said what was in her heart right then.

"Get into the driveway. I don't want them to see the dirty dishes."

As a marketing communications professional with 25 years experience, Christine Krueger's writing has been previously published under the names of public and nonprofit executives. Recently, National Public Radio's This I Believe program and MinnPost have published Krueger's creative nonfiction.