mavis fodness
By Mavis Fodness, reporterJanuary 19, 2021A little bit of Rock County has found a home in Iowa. I recently toured a brand new 4,800-head finishing barn near where my daughter lives in rural Schaller, Iowa. She is the reason a part of the county she grew up in now has a home in another state. Courtney works for a company that builds those large hog confinements. Midwest Dry Cast, located south of Luverne, makes the concrete floor slats…
By Mavis Fodness, reporterDecember 21, 2020Instead of making a New Year’s resolution for 2020, I assembled a “vision” board instead. It proved to be a much better way to affect positive change than resolutions, which never lasted a month, much less an entire year. Ideally, pictures from magazines are used to “visually” represent an activity or feeling one wants to focus on, but I made a list. Among the items I wrote on my board was to…
By Mavis Fodness, reporterNovember 23, 2020This summer I celebrated my 55th birthday. That’s right the 5-5 —the posted speed limit on most county highways. It is also the minimum age for participating in the eight-hour defensive driving class through the Minnesota Safety Council and Luverne Community Education. Any driver 55 and older can take the initial class that allows certificate holders to receive an auto insurance discount. I…
By Mavis Fodness, reporterNovember 03, 2020Circumstances are murky as to how Orville Iveland’s military dog tag ended up in the farm grove of Russell and Doris Wenzel in Springwater Township. What’s clear is that the dog tag is now safely in the Iveland family’s procession. An Oct. 22 Star Herald story with the Wenzels about an unusual rock unearthed during a farm tile project led Russell to showing me a dull-colored metal dog tag he…
By Mavis Fodness, reporterOctober 06, 2020This week is National 4-H Week. In the early weeks of the new 4-H year, my social media feed was sprinkled with memories of my kids’ 4-H state livestock shows. 4-H is where we learned about sheep, hogs, rabbits, leadership, horses and cattle. It’s a program where I still participate as an adult adviser and have developed lifelong friendships as a result. For the past six years, as part of my job…
By Mavis Fodness, reporterSeptember 01, 2020As reporters, we routinely convey stories on a wide variety of topics. This week I’ve chosen to tell a high school classmate’s story. However, this one doesn’t have a happy ending, but maybe you can help write a positive chapter in the story. Doctors told Curt Thorson on Aug. 10 that the sharp abdominal pain he has suddenly begun to experience was the Stage IV pancreatic cancer spreading through…
By Mavis Fodness, reporterAugust 11, 2020While removing the leaf from the kitchen table one day, my thoughts landed on how a simple piece of furniture reflects the changes in our empty nest household. In our 30-plus years of marriage, Bryan and I always had a kitchen table and a dining table in each of the half dozen or so homes we’ve lived in during our time together. The duo tables are the result of an auctioneer husband who couldn’t…
By Mavis Fodness, reporterJuly 14, 2020A half mile past my farm home in Battle Plain Township, a magnificent cottonwood tree used to grow tall and proud against the prairie skyline. For more than a decade before its demise, the tree marked the turnaround point for horseback rides, walks, and most recently, my attempts at jogging. Today there’s nothing left of the tree, no stump or hole, just my memory that there used to be that…
By Mavis Fodness, reporterJune 16, 2020Since the first cases of the coronavirus hit Minnesota in March, one of my colleagues went missing. Gone. Poof. Vanished. In the past three months only a handful of sightings of former sports editor John Rittenhouse have been passed on to the newsroom, but none of these by me, this former colleague. Three months ago, as the newspaper was scrambling to understand the new health rules, John quietly…
By Mavis Fodness, reporterMay 19, 2020My last in-person visit with my granddaughter, Jayden, was March 6. Almost 60 days later, on the bright, sunny Sunday morning of May 3, the grandmother in me knew it was time to see Jayden face to face. Unbeknownst to me, when my daughter Courtney told Jayden that MeeMaw Mavis was coming to Iowa for a visit, her response was “MeeMaw Mavis is not dead?” It’s been a long two months for my 2-year-…
By Mavis Fodness, reporterApril 21, 2020Dear Logan, We’re sorry we won’t be able to share your first birthday with you this year. Again this MeeMaw will be late with her hugs and kisses of best wishes. It appears April 11 is just not a good date for us to get together. You don’t remember last year, but I was late meeting you in Iowa due to a blizzard here in Minnesota. We lost electricity and Papa Bryan had to hook up a generator to…
By Mavis FodnessMarch 31, 2020Last week, with Gov. Walz’s order to shelter in place for two weeks, we at the Star Herald newsroom did some of our work from home to distance ourselves from others in the office while continuing the delivery of the community news. On Thursday, as I tested video conferencing from home (I found unmuting the keyboard is a must), I realized that I miss the “old school” philosophy of news…
By Mavis Fodness, reporterMarch 03, 2020Leap Day rolls around every four years, and I was excited about this year’s Feb. 29. Similar to daylight saving time, when we push our clocks back an hour in the fall, I see the 2020 Leap Day as a 24-hour bonus because it occurred on a weekend. What would I do with a whole extra day? Not only that, but a day where temperatures were predicted to reach 50 degrees, an outdoor warmth we hadn’t…
By Mavis Fodness, reporterFebruary 04, 2020More than a year ago local readers were introduced to Ryan and Martha Tofteland. The young couple and their children, Finn and Liv, were visiting Ryan’s parents, Steve and Julie Tofteland, and his childhood home in rural Luverne for Thanksgiving 2018. It was a bittersweet visit for the young couple. Two years prior, in August 2016, Ryan was diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis or Lou…
January 07, 2020Growing up, I often heard the phrase “Keeping up with the Joneses.” Now, I didn’t have any neighbors named Jones, but I knew the saying referred to buying something just because someone else already had the same item. By owning the item, you were at the same high social level, and those who didn’t have said item were somehow at a lower socio-economic scale. Decades later the “Keeping up with the…
By Mavis Fodness, reporterDecember 03, 2019Our new puppy, Lucy, a lab-Brittany spaniel mix, often chases her own tail. The sight is comical, as she spins and snaps her teeth at her long brown tail. She spins in both directions, quite fast, until she catches her tail in her mouth and, after a brief pause, continues to spin in circles. I often feel I’m spinning in circles, not seeming to accomplish much of anything when it comes to dealing…
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