Fiftieth anniversaries are often a reason to celebrate. Usually there’s punch and coffee with cookies, maybe cupcakes.

I’m not sure that will happen in this case: The Brown County Sanitary Landfill opened for “business” the summer of 1972. Happy birthday landfill!

I’ve made a couple trips there this summer, as my wife and I are cleaning out some stuff. Pam went along the last time; she had never been there.

I told someone that’s our idea of a date now.

In the past, I took a kid or two along, and that was a great adventure. I’m sure we weren’t supposed to be doing this, but if there were no other trucks dumping, we’d look around at the pile.

Once, we found a perfectly good toy horse in the rubble. It came home with us, forever to be named “Landfill Pony.”

The staff out there is always friendly and funny. A sense of humor may come from spending your working hours seeing the discards from every farm, business and home of Brown County. It’s kind of the seamy underside of a modern society. Or at least its junky underside.

Going back half a century, I’m sure the Legislature had in mind some level of consistency in handling of waste across the state by mandating counties to have a landfill. Before then, I suspect things were getting thrown, buried, or piled up in all sorts of random and haphazard settings.

I recall Sleepy Eye’s city dump being on the edge of town out the direction of our farm. I remember hearing my dad talking about what the rats would do that summer. We were close enough to have visitors from that rodent community.

I remember hearing as a kid that sometimes they migrated in large packs. Rat packs. I had a couple nightmares with that image in my head.

I can’t say our family’s efforts at waste management were especially enlightened, either. When I was young, we piled garbage on the edge of the grove. Every so often my dad would load it on the truck. We’d haul it somewhere south of here, where we shoveled it down a ravine along the Cottonwood River. Looking down there, we weren’t the only ones using that method of disposal.

When I was older, we had a pit that doubled as a morgue for dead chickens and refuse site for our house garbage. I guess that was an improvement. The good news is that was glass and metal back then. Paper went in the burn barrel. Plastics weren’t as omnipresent as they were to become.

Now when I look into the giant pit at the landfill, plastic-this and plastic-that make up the majority of the stuff in there. As wonderful as plastic is to store food, package things to ship, and a million other uses, we know what an environmental nightmare it has become. Long after our species has become extinct or moved to another solar system, the pop bottle I forgot to recycle will be buried there in Stark Township, leaching toxic crud for millennia.

Speaking of space, the only thing to compare the landfill to is a bizarre gaping lunar landscape. But it’s not a barren, colorless one. When you drive out to the spot where you dump, you look down into a great canyon with mountainsides of garbage. It’s a weird collage of our stuff with all sorts of colors, drab and bright.

It’s another matter when you get close enough to offload your own contribution to the pile. Up close, the collage becomes individual items. A mattress, an empty toy box, a broken hose, a cereal box. It all has a story. Born in a factory, shipped to a store, bought, and used by one of us, now it’s here to be buried. No funeral or visitation planned.

For most of us, it’s buried and forgotten as we move on to filling our next dumpster. For Mathiowetz Construction Company and county staff in charge out there, they don’t have the luxury of “out of sight, out of mind.” It is extremely regulated and monitored with test wells around it.

I’m glad for that. I know there is a popular attitude among some that opposes regulations and government oversight in general. I don’t want to live in their world, and I don’t really think they would, either. I like the idea that someone cares what might be leaching from the landfill and getting into the water my grandchild will drink.

I have to admit, it can be depressing going out there. This incredible giant pile is just from 25,000 of us who live in Brown County.

What in the world does the landfill for Chicago look like?

Or Mexico City?

There are environmental challenges every where we look. Disposing of our crap isn’t even at the top of the list. Safe water and healthy soils are more immediate concerns, since we need those to live every day.

Global warming overwhelms all others as we look to the future. Climate change is the existential threat to Earth and every species upon it. We are fools to ignore that.

We need, each of us, to do our little piece. While we need to keep our eye on the big issues, there is value in trying to starve the landfill. Reducing our contribution to that is part of treading lightly on this planet. After all, as we hurdle toward nine billion of us sharing this place, that should be our goal. To do as little damage as we can and leave as little behind as possible.

Creation is after all the Creator’s. We borrow it for a short time.

What if each of us used one less plastic bag a week?

Reuse a bag or bundle things together. Or take two trips to the car. Maybe you’ve got a bigger, better idea to send less stuff to the Brown County Sanitary Landfill.

Let’s do it. Consider it a 50th birthday present to the old girl.

Randy Krzmarzick farms on the home place west of Sleepy Eye where he lives with his wife, Pam.

Levi, Hailey and Gizmo

Sleepy Eye’s wonderful lake/bike trail goes through Allison Park on the south side. Alongside the trail is a faded ten-foot metal merry-go-round. It had six bright colors fanning out from its center long ago. There is more rust than color now. It’s wobbly and not really level.

It’s the type you used to see in every school yard and town park. I’ve been to Allison Park many times as a kid, father, and grandfather, but I don’t remember when this merry-go-round was put in. It’s at least a few decades old.

My grandson is an age where we can easily while away a couple of hours at a park. If there’s another kid to play with, it could be all day. Modern playgrounds have soft rubbery surfaces and kid-safe plastic coverings. A lot of thought has gone into making playgrounds safe. There are less places a kid can fall from and less hard edges for a kid to cut themselves or break a tooth.

The venerable merry-go-round in Sleepy Eye is definitely “old school,” a remnant from the generation of playground equipment that was metal and wood. Scraped knees, slivers, bloody lips were all common. Broken collarbones and stitches were not unheard of.

If you are my age, you probably got hurt at a playground. There were more kids back then from big families. I don’t want to say we were expendable. That’s not exactly right, but some cuts and bruises were expected. Those tall slides without sides, metal jungle gyms and monkey bars, swings without harnesses that went twenty feet in the air: it was easy for laughter to turn to tears in a split second.

Sleepy Eye’s aging merry-go-round looks innocent enough tucked between the trees and shelters. But I can see that sometime, someone is going to look at it, and decide it’s antiquated look and mildly dangerous nature mean it should go to metal recycling. Maybe I’ll spearhead a movement to Save the Merry-Go-Round. (I wasn’t very successful with a certain Save the Golf Course effort a few years ago.)

A while back, I came across a small merry-go-round that was going unused in some trees and brush by an old park. It seemed to need a home. I had Donny Haala sandblast and paint it and found a spot for it in the orchard. I dug a hole, cemented in the center pipe, and carefully set it on with the loader.

Pam was not wildly excited by it, but she has tolerated my oddball ideas. You can see it pictured here. It is good for getting my grandson dizzy when he visits. And me if I try to go round with him.

Speaking of Pam, I noticed something during the raising of our three kids. She was more cautious than I was. I think Anna, Abby, and Ezra would concur. At an early age they learned that if they wanted to do something slightly risky, they knew to ask me for permission.

I took Pam’s approach to be a mom-thing. I am glad Pam was the way she was. Her careful and prudent approach was a necessary counterbalance to my mild recklessness. It was one of many ways we offered our children two ways to see the world.

There are many successful single parents. But there are advantages to a mom and a dad. Having two distinct views about everything has value. For all the times Pam and I drove each other nuts, I can’t imagine raising kids alone.

I can picture a 5-year-old Abby climbing towards the edge of cliff on the North Shore to get a better look at the Lake Superior. Glances went from Mom to Dad as her mind worked the situation.

“Is Mom going to say anything?

I’ll just keep looking at Dad. He understands why I need to climb out here.”

Now as a grown-up, Abby makes her way in occasional precarious situations as part of her job with the United Nations, I’m glad she got of a dose of her mom’s cautiousness. She has some risk-taker in her. I might get blame for that.

That is part of every childhood: learning the grasp of what is safe and what is not, knowing limits and understanding boundaries, when to take chances and when to step back. It’s primarily the work of parents to develop that. But in the sense of it taking a village, we all have roles. When we are in a store and see a small child has briefly moved out of their parent’s sight, we instinctively know to watch that child for a moment.

When a society functions well, there are eyes on children everywhere they go, making sure they don’t run out into traffic or get too close to water. It is the mark of a healthy community when all care about the next generation, even if they aren’t kin.

That’s what is so horrific about child abuse. It is the ultimate betrayal. Not only to a single innocent child. But to the entire society around that child. Sad and ill consequences of such harmful behavior will outlast the perpetrator, decades into the future.

Every childhood is unique and to be valued and protected by those around the child. Much has been made recently of guarding children from certain truths. According to some, we are to keep them from the knowledge that there are people different than them. And that our country is not a perfect place. I think they do a disservice to young people.

On the other hand, I would like to see more done to prevent children from physical harm. Specifically, from guns, now the leading cause of death among children. That’s embarrassing for our country. There is no other place on Earth where it is this easy to own weapons. More children are dying every day from accidental shootings and domestic fights.

I wrote last time about the Texas school shooting. Many comments made me to know I am not alone in this. If we care about children, but refuse to put any limits on guns, we are fooling ourselves. Unfortunately, we are not fooling the dead children. Children who will never be able to ride a merry-go-round again.

Rain was forecast for Tuesday night. That’s been a constant this spring.

Whenever we got into the fields, it was only for a short time before the next rain. So, Tuesday was a 16-hour planting day for me. That was 16 hours with an apple and a muffin and a thermos of water. It’s late May and time for lollygagging has been compressed out of this planting season.

The second half of Tuesday was that – another shooting. It felt oddly commonplace, flipping stations for updates: how many dead, what do we know about the shooter, any connection between the shooter and the shot?

It is, of course, commonplace. By now, every one of us knows the emotional path we will take. On a tractor, as long as the planter monitor doesn’t sound an alarm and I’m staring at that marker trench in the dirt in front of me, there is ample space for emotions in the cab. Overwhelming sadness and anger rush to take up most of the space in my head, with frustration, confusion, and rage filling in air pockets.

You, like me, probably take a mental walk down the empathy path.

What does it feel like to be the friend or relative of a victim?

This is difficult enough and can lead to tears if done well. Empathy is a valuable skill for the members of our race to have, essential to a well-functioning society I would say.

But what does it feel like to be a parent of a dead child?

If you are a parent, you can get a small sense of the blow to the gut that would be by thinking of your own children. But it is literally beyond comprehending. It would be a sadness and emptiness that we do not have words for. Nothing I can write here could describe that. No writer in the world could.

On Wednesday morning, I woke, and yesterday’s news came into my head.

What would it be like to wake the morning after losing your child?

Then I thought, you wouldn’t have slept anyway if you were that parent.

How do you ever fall asleep again?

The hole in you would be deep and permanent.

Back to the tractor radio, as darkness fell and my world shrunk to what the tractor lights illuminated, two reporters from the BBC asked a quite logical question: why does this keep happening in the United States of America and nowhere else?

I thought about the humor website The Onion. Every time one of these shootings occurs, they post the same headline: “‘No Way to Prevent This’ Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens.”

We like to think of the United States as “exceptional.” I guess we’re right.

At least I don’t delude myself anymore. Nothing will change and, in a few weeks or months, I will be on the tractor feeling all these emotions again.

Maybe it won’t be small children in a school. Maybe it will be Blacks or Jews or Hispanics. As difficult as those are, it’s easier seeing adults than dead school kids lying in pools of blood in my mind’s eye.

A reporter said that the young bodies are torn apart by bullets from an automatic rifle, no clean shot to the heart. Then, the parents must identify their child.

Can you imagine that?

No. We can’t.

How come no one goes and shoots up a nursing home?

It might be easier to accept the senseless death of old people who’ve lived a life, rather than kids who are having theirs snatched away from them.

I admire and appreciate that people close to the dead will insist there be change. God bless them. Since your loved one is dead for no known reason, I can see how one would want some small bit of useful good to come from that mindless evil. God bless them, but it won’t matter.

According to polls, a large majority of Americans agree on a number of common-sense limits to guns. It doesn’t matter. Nothing will change. The large majority of Americans can go to hell.

I could use this space to report that the United States has more guns per capita than every nation on Earth except for Syria and Libya. Or that the number of suicides by bullet and accidental shootings have grown perfectly in step with the proliferation of handguns in the last 20 years. Or I could restate the simple fact that if you are carrying a gun, you are more likely to be killed by gunfire than if you are unarmed.

I guess I just wrote those. But it was a waste of my time and yours. Sorry.

On the tractor radio, the last weeks have been filled with ads for candidates who want to fill the empty congressional seat. Most include a line about protecting our Second Amendment rights. If I had just flown here from the last century, I would have assumed they were referring to guns used for hunting. No one has ever talked about limits on those.

Can I be clearer about that?

NO ONE has ever tried to take legitimate hunting guns away.

That was so last century. Now, by “Second Amendment rights,” we mean that there can be no limits on guns of any kind. None. And if a confused 18-year-old boy wants to buy an assault rifle, damn it, he can. Because this is America, and that right is greater than the rights of nineteen children in a small town in Texas to live.

Don’t ask whether we value guns more than children. That’s a trick question. We know the answer.

Farmers like predictability. I like putting the seed in the ground, knowing the sun will shine, the rain will fall, and I will harvest in the fall. I like to think my machines will work.

Some predictable things aren’t so good. I know sometime soon, I will be on a tractor punching buttons, racing about finding news about the next shooting in America.

That’s actually more predictable than my crops growing or my machines working. Because there is nothing we can do about it.

You’d think this great country could do better. You’re wrong. We can’t.

– Randy Krzmarzick farms on the home place west of Sleepy Eye where he lives with his wife, Pam.

In the art of small talk, it’s good to start with something you agree on. We all share the weather. Jesus recognized that when He said, “He causes the sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous.”

It’s safe to open a conversation with, “Cold enough for you?” Or “When’s the last time we saw the sun?” Both those lines have been useful this spring. None more so than, “Geez, it’s windy out.”

As I begin writing this, we are in a wind advisory. It might save the National Weather Service time to let us know when fierce winds aren’t blowing unsecured objects to the next township. Issue a “Calm Advisory” and just assume the rest of the time it’s blowing like heck.

I heard a meteorologist say they have tools to measure historic precipitation and temperatures, not so for wind velocity. He agreed though this spring has been the windiest of his career.

March and April are typically windy months. There is nothing so pleasant as those first warm southern breezes. We feel spring arriving, literally melting winter away. I’ve often planted corn in high winds. That means coming in at night with a face darkened by graphite I shake on the seed to lube the planter. The black powder swirls in the wind and always flies up at me.

This spring, there haven’t been many warm breezes. A lot more howling winds from the north. It’s as if Old Man Winter won’t relinquish control. The few days the wind has been out of the south, it gusted frantically as if trying to catch up with the delayed season. The bitter winds made it hard to stay outside. I’m two weeks behind in my work, which about matches everything in nature.

One day I was working on a tractor in the yard and looked up to see our 14-foot trampoline rolling by on its side. I keep it in a spot where it is sheltered from north and south winds, but that day there was crazy east wind. It might have continued to Springfield if not for hitting the old cattle fence.

All the wind meant branch-picking-up made regular appearances on my to-do list. Trees are amazing in their ability to withstand wind. But they sacrifice branches to natural pruning. There’s nothing like hours of bending for branches to remind me how soft I’ve become after the long winter.

Winds have been a prominent theme around here lately. Last August 28, a storm did substantial wind damage to corn fields over a wide area, ours included. Stalks weakened by drought were susceptible to leaning or breaking. It made harvest a lot less fun. It’s depressing this spring to see the yellow ears sticking out of the tilled ground that the combine couldn’t gather. It’s a good year to be a field mouse.

Then before Christmas, our farm was on the north edge of this phenomenon: “On December 15, a rapidly-deepening low-pressure area contributed to a historic expanse of inclement weather across the Great Plains and Midwest, resulting in an unprecedented derecho and tornado outbreak across the Northern United States.”

A record number of December tornadoes spun out of the sky from Kansas to Wisconsin. I’m not sure exactly what sort of winds we had. But the west side of a steel building was blown apart and scattered hundreds of feet into a field. The way wood and steel were twisted and bent, it’s as if a bomb went off.

Every crop is a gamble and faces multiple risks. But this year, excessive wind has moved to the top of things I worry about, ahead of hail, drought, flooding, insects, weeds, diseases, not to mention spiraling costs. Phew. No wonder I can’t sleep.

Corn plants must stand from “knee high by the Fourth of July” until October harvest. That’s four months where howling winds from the Canadian prairie or the Gulf of Mexico can wreak havoc on the stalks. I’ve added extra wind and hail insurance on my crops because of recent weather.

Our grove had damage in both those storms. Wind out of south in August and north in December knocked down large trees that had survived sixty or seventy years of prairie winds. That tells me this isn’t normal. It causes one to wonder what’s going on. Is there something we’re seeing on my farm that’s part of something larger?

All weather is the result of troughs and waves of air pushing and sliding around our globe. There is no way to assign any single moment’s weather in a single place to climate change. But as the impact from man-caused atmospheric warming grows, it becomes likelier that the wind harassing my crops and trees is a piece of that. Things like the historic drought in the west and melting of the polar ice caps are easier to assign to global climate shifts.

Regardless, there is no more doubt that global warming and our species culpability for it are real and worsening. We need to quit arguing and let the smart people find solutions. They are. The question is whether it will be in time to avoid an apocalyptic future for our grandchildren.

We all know someone who has a video that proves that manmade climate change is a fraud, that these thousands of scientists are lying to us. Do we want to take our chances with this giant majority of the world’s climate experts with vast consensus? Or uncle Bob’s YouTube video?

Global climate change is the round Earth of our time. Flat Earthers will believe what they will, and God bless them. But the rest of us need to get to work making things better. It helps if we all push in one direction. Or at least get out of the way.

As I finish writing this, we’ve just had back-to-back evenings of severe weather with thunderstorm and tornado warnings racing across the Midwest. Weirdly duplicative one night to the next, it was a game of Russian roulette where you hope and pray the eighty mile per hour winds miss you. Then the next morning, you cringe and offer prayers for those who weren’t lucky as the destruction appears in the morning light.

Again, there is no way to know if this is just the Earth being the Earth. Or if we are seeing consequences from human impact on our planet-home. But the combination of Aug. 28, Dec. 15, and May 11-12 look suspicious to me.

Here we go. Another season!

I mean the growing season. And the baseball season. Those two mirror and complement each other so perfectly as to be like art. A number of writers have made that association. None better than Bart Giamatti, the former commissioner who died too young.

He wrote of baseball, “It breaks your heart. It is designed to break your heart. The game begins in the spring, when everything else begins again, and it blossoms in the summer, filling the afternoons and evenings, and then as soon as the chill rains come, it stops and leaves you to face the fall all alone. You count on it, rely on it to buffer the passage of time, to keep the memory of sunshine and high skies alive, and then just when the days are all twilight, when you need it most, it stops.”

A lot of good writing is about heartache. I look up Giamatti’s quote when I want to feel melancholy. Feeling a little sad is like enjoying an occasional rainy day; they make you appreciate the sunny days.

Anyway, the growing season is what I do (farmer), and the baseball season is what I love (fan). We are on the front end of both. Winter is giving up her grasp haltingly, as cold and wind greet us when we step out the door and go back in to get a heavier coat. Neither planting nor the Twins season is off to a great start. But there’s always tomorrow, right?

I like to sneak to a game before planting to meet up with former Sleepy Eye kid Bill Moran. Bill is my go-to when it comes to all-things Twins. Spending a few hours at various spots around Target Field with Bill gets me ready for the 162-game dash. He fills me in on areas of optimism and concern.

Last Wednesday, the weather report wasn’t terrible. That’s as good as it gets this spring. I bought a $4 ticket entitling me to pay $12 for a beer. I walked out on the plaza in rightfield and took in that glorious green field, a moment I look forward to all winter. Right then it started sleeting. The rain quit eventually, but it stayed cloudy and cool. The Twins got one hit, made some bad plays, and lost 7 to 0. Regardless it was a day at the ballpark, and any day at the ballpark is a good day.

It’s April, so I’m predicting a World Series for the Twins and 200-bushel corn for my fields. I’ve predicted a World Series for the Twins for sixty straight years so don’t go placing any bets on account of me. Two hundred bushels isn’t that uncommon now, so I’ll shoot for 250 as long as we’re being wildly optimistic. Spring does that. Until the losses pile up or drought settles in, there’s hope for the best.

That’s the thing about a new season. Anything is possible. All my rows could be straight and clean. The garden will be abundant, the apple trees full of perfect red fruits in September. Byron Buxton could play 160 games. The Twins might even beat the Yankees in the playoffs.

Okay, maybe not that last one. But you get the point. If you can’t be insanely idealistic in April, when can you be?

A season is a manageable piece of time. We’ll know in a half year how any of this works out. It is more a sprint than a marathon. You can give it your full attention, whether it’s the crops or the baseball season, knowing the day will come when the equipment is put away and the last pitch is thrown.

Having done this a while, I know the routine. Winter follows. I don’t look forward to winter. But I know it’s out there, and there will be a chance to live that slower pace again. It’s not quite hibernating, but there’s time to spend under a blanket with a book that summer doesn’t afford.

The seasons have been metaphor as long as people have used words. Spring lends itself to birth and beginnings, summer to growth, fall to completion, winter to sleep and, yes, death. We understand things in comparison to the time it takes the Earth to go around the sun.

Not everything happens in 12-month chunks, but we still refer to seasons. Lives, marriages, organizations, even nations have a beginning and an end, with growth and decline in between. I saw my grandson for Easter. We have fun with the fact that he is six and I am sixty-six. He is somewhere in May, and I am in September. He is the young corn plant, vibrant green, shooting up to the sky. I am the mature stalk, hoping to stay upright till harvest.

One could spend hours making comparisons to seasons. Pam’s and my marriage is past the intense, giddy days of spring when stormy days alternate with bright sun. We’re settling into a comfortable autumn of gentle breezes and agreeable temperatures.

There is much talk about our nation and western democracies. Are they in a decline with dark days of authoritarian winter ahead? What about religions that are struggling with numbers right now? Is this autumn for them or a cloudy spell before the sun comes back out?

We don’t know for sure who wrote Ecclesiastes. Tradition held it was Solomon, although scholars doubt that. Whoever it was, 2,500 years before Bart Giamatti, someone was thinking of the seasons and humankind:

“For everything there is a season,
A time for every activity under heaven.
A time to be born and a time to die.
A time to plant and a time to harvest.”

It goes on: kill and heal, tear down and build up, cry and laugh, grieve and dance, embrace and turn away, tear and mend, be quiet and speak, love and hate. Sadly, Ecclesiastes reports there is a time for war, as we are learning again, and a time for peace, as we pray again for.

Alas, all these, good and not so good, are as predictable as the greening of the Earth in the spring and the browning in the fall.

If Ecclesiastes were written today, it might include “A time to bunt and a time to swing away. A time to bring the infield in and a time to play the line.” So, here we go, the 2022 season. Best to you in your own planting, whether that’s corn, tomatoes, or a pot of marigolds. And go Twins.