NOVEMBER 13, 2025 – This afternoon on my return from hill climbs in “Little Switzerland,” I espied my hearty friend and neighbor Fred corralling leaves in his well-attended yard of his well-appointed house. (When Beth and I were newbies to the neighborhood nearly 40 years ago, people referred to Fred and his late wife Carol’s house as “that really nice house on Iowa Avenue,” and everyone knew immediately which dwelling was being referenced.) I introduced Fred to my readers in 2023. A retired chemist, Fred had been widowed a year or two before. We got acquainted when other neighbors told me about Fred’s continuation of his wife’s legacy: hosting an Easter extravaganza for all the neighborhood kids—a joyous occasion to which I finagled an invitation for Illiana, who was seven at the time.
Because I hadn’t seen Fred in all too long, I felt bad that I hadn’t checked in sooner. Months had passed since I’d seen him striding past our house on his daily walk. I was relieved to see him in fine fettle, even though he was manhandling . . . a leaf blower.
I needn’t have worried about Fred, who’s going on 82 and as sharp and agile as ever. When I kidded him about chasing leaves around with a leaf blower, he immediately redeemed himself by informing me that he’d mulched them first with his lawnmower (! – See yesterday’s post). He assured me that the leaf blower was used simply to tidy things up. “I use the mulched leaves for my gardens,” he said.
With his characteristic graciousness, Fred invited me into his porch to visit for a while. When I mentioned that I hadn’t seen him walking in the neighborhood lately, he said he’d changed his route. He now walks through Como Park and around the lake each day for a total distance of a very respectable four and a half miles. But absence from the neighborhood was also the result of time spent at his wilderness retreat at the west end of Lake Vermillion.
When he asked about me latest activities, I mentioned my Pergola-on-a-Platform project up at Björnholm. He listened politely and perhaps, I later thought, with a touch of amusement.
When I finished a diluted description of my effort, Fred said his latest cabin project was a woodshed. In our northland, “woodshed” can mean many things. At the simple end of the spectrum, a woodshed can be as simple as the sort Dad designed and built up at the cabin—nothing more than covered racks assembled from treated 2 x 4s resting on cement blocks to keep everything off the ground. At the other end of the woodshed scale is the kind that was built by our closest neighbor to the east of Björnholm, Mr. George “Is that so?” Campbell. Campbell was Grandpa’s contemporary, and when the white-haired Scotsman was a bit older than I am now, he constructed a fully enclosed woodshed with a gable roof and old folding doors that Grandpa had donated to the project—garage doors that Grandpa had replaced with a modern one at my grandparents’ home back in Minneapolis. The vertical siding on George Campbell’s woodshed consisted of pine slabs—with the bark still intact. An old milling saw blade was hung on the gable end above the entrance.
Fred’s woodshed, however, which is in its third year of construction, is in a league of its own. I initially pictured something in the middle range of possibilities; a three sided affair with a shed roof and horizontal slats liberally spaced to allow for ample air flow. When I asked if that was what he’d designed, Fred said, “No, its a structure made out of logs just like a log cabin.” He then pulled out his phone to show me a photo of the building under construction.
It was like no woodshed I’d ever seen. As Fred had said, it was “like a log cabin” made from balsam logs that Fred himself had harvested from his acreage. With a hatchet he’d painstakingly debarked each one of the 10-inch logs and fitted them together, using birch doweling. “There’s not a single nail in the whole structure,” Fred said with a smile. Moreover, he’d done all the work himself except for his niece’s help debarking a log during a brief visit.
I was too amazed and humbled by Fred’s work—especially at his age—to show a photo of my Pergola-on-a-Platform. As between the whimsical and the heavy-duty utilitarian, the latter was the one that deserved a Minnesota State Fair blue ribbon. But of course . . . the Pergola, etc. is in Wisconsin, and thus not eligible for the “DIY Minnesota Log Construction – Woodshed Division” competition at the Minnesota State Fair.[1] I was relieved that Fred never asked if I had any photos of my project. At an appropriate point in our conversation, I deflected his potential question: I changed the subject by asking . . .
“So, Fred, what do you think of the state of the world?”
“Oh gosh! I don’t even wanna go there!”
“So then, Fred,” I said, “how many winter days’ worth of firewood will you be able to store in your log cabin?” With that we shifted back to something safe, sound, and soothing: shoring up for winter.
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© 2025 by Eric Nilsson
[1] I’m making this up.
