Maple Grove Gazette - September 19, 2026
Maple Grove's Only Newspaper of Record—Vol. 1 No. 23—Edited by Mr. Ellison, Town Archivist & Historian
FROM THE EDITOR'S DESK
It has rained for ten days. This editor states that plainly and at the top because it is the only fact anyone in Maple Grove has been willing to discuss since the previous Saturday, and because there is no arrangement of words that will make it more interesting than it is. It rained. It is still raining. The forecast, which this newspaper prints as a courtesy and not as a promise, suggests it will stop.
The water comes down the state road, as water in this town has always come down the state road, and arrives at the corner where the state road becomes Main with nowhere particular to go. The grates take what they can. What they cannot take runs along the curb in a steady brown ribbon the width of a dinner plate, and turns at the corner, and goes on down Main past the hardware store and the florist and the shoe repair in a manner that several residents have described to this editor as a river. It is not a river. It is runoff, and it is four inches across at its most ambitious. This editor raises the point only because the description has begun to travel.
The fields, for the record, are untouched and were going to be untouched this week regardless. There is nothing out there to bring in yet. The farmers have spent ten days doing what farmers do in the middle of September when it rains, which is to spend the day at the diner drinking coffee and regaling each other with memories from their youth. They also have opinions about October that this newspaper will print when October arrives and not before.
It is the college that has made the week a story. The ditch that runs along the state road out by the campus entrance—which is a proper ditch, cut deep, and which has been running full and fast since Sunday—was discovered by students on Monday afternoon and has not been left alone since. They ride it in inner tubes. On Wednesday there was a kayak. The stretch that works is perhaps sixty yards between the entrance and the culvert, and a rider who does not sit up in time goes into the culvert, and this editor is given to understand that this has happened twice and is considered part of it. They have named it the Maple Grove River. Signs were made. This editor is obliged to record, for the archive and for whoever is reading this in fifty years wondering where the river went, that it is a ditch, and that no one has cared about this correction at any point during the week in which it was issued.
Chief Carter was asked what the department intended to do about it and said there was no ordinance against a ditch, that he had looked, and that he was not going to write one in a week when nobody had been hurt and everyone was going to be back in class by Monday anyway. Asked a second time, on Friday, after the signs went up, he said his answer had not changed and that he would like that printed.
The high school, not to be outdone by an institution it has never acknowledged as competition, found a slope. The particulars belong to the Blotter. This editor will say only that the tarp was returned.
Brewed Awakenings has taken the brunt of it, and is the one business in town for which this week has been an unqualified success and an unqualified ordeal, in that order, every day, for ten days. The shop has not been dry since Monday. The only place on campus for Maple Grove College students to hang out is the library or their dorm room, which means that a young person who does not want to sit in a wet residence hall sits at Brewed Awakenings instead, for a considerable while, over a cup they bought at eleven and were still holding at three.
On Tuesday Lisa set out four bowls of rock salt on the windowsills to draw the damp out of the room. The bowls are still there. The room is, by general agreement, better than it was, and the salt has received the credit for this in every conversation this editor has overheard on the subject. This editor is obliged to record what he observed, which is that the four window tables were the coldest and wettest seats in the building, that a bowl of salt now occupies each of them, that nobody has sat at any of the four since Tuesday, and that the line consequently no longer backs up into the doorway where the door was being held open by it. Whether this is what Lisa intended, this editor cannot say and did not ask. Belle allowed on Thursday that the room did seem drier. Mildred observed that it was fifty-one degrees, raining, and full of wet coats. Belle said she had not said dry, she had said drier. Mildred let it go, which Belle noted aloud was the first time.
📜 POLICE BLOTTER
MAPLE GROVE POLICE DEPARTMENT—INCIDENT REPORT
Reporting Officer: Officer Markle Week of: September 12-18
State Road at the College Entrance—Persons in the Roadway Ditch. Reported by Officer Wilson. A motorist reported between six and nine persons in the drainage ditch along the eastbound shoulder, some in inflatable tubes and one in a kayak. Officer Wilson responded and confirmed the report, with the correction that the kayak had by then been carried back up to the entrance for a second attempt. All parties were out of the roadway and none were in the traffic lane at any time. The department notes that no ordinance prohibits the use of a drainage ditch and that the Chief has declined to seek one. Parties were advised that the culvert is a culvert. Final Disposition: Advised. No further action.
High School Practice Field—Report of Damage to School Property. Reported by Officer Sanchez. A complaint was received Thursday evening regarding a number of students on the slope behind the practice field, a quantity of mud, and a tarpaulin belonging to the feed store. Officer Sanchez responded, located eleven students, and confirmed the tarpaulin's ownership and its subsequent return in the same condition it left in, which the feed store describes as poor. The district groundskeeper, asked to assess the damage, viewed the slope and declined to call it damage, stating that nothing has ever grown there and that nothing ever will. Final Disposition: Unfounded.
📋 COMMUNITY NOTICES
Standing Water—the four principal streets and the state road approach, through the weekend. Motorists are asked to slow at the corner, where the water stands deepest and where a vehicle taken through it at speed will put the whole of it onto the sidewalk and, on one occasion Tuesday, into the doorway of the florist. Mrs. Wilson has asked this editor to note that she saw who it was.
Storm Grates—a request from the Village Council. Residents are asked to clear the grate in front of their own property of leaves and whatever else has come down. The Council notes that this is the entire extent of what the Council can do about the situation, and that it is doing it.
Fall Farmers Market—Saturdays through October, 9:00 a.m. to noon, the green. Four vendors set up last Saturday in the rain and sold, between them, most of what they brought. The apples are in. The pumpkin weigh-in remains scheduled for October and remains, per the same grower as last week, "not a joke."
School Photographs—Retakes Wednesday, October 7. Envelopes are still due back at the office before the retake date rather than on it.
Sump Pumps. Gordon reports that he sold out Tuesday morning, that the truck comes Thursday, and that he has been telling people the truck comes Thursday since Monday. He asks this editor to note that he is aware of how that sounds.
🏛️ HISTORICAL NOTE
A reader has asked this editor, reasonably, what the archive says about a rain like this one, and this editor is obliged to answer that the archive says less than it should, and to explain why.
In September of 1955 the building that then housed this newspaper took eleven inches of water in the basement over a night and part of a morning. The bound volumes were kept on the high shelf, as they had been kept on the high shelf since the paper began, and they survived, which is why this newspaper can tell you what was printed in Maple Grove in any week of any year since 1911 and can show you a school photograph from every one of them. What sat on the floor was the correspondence—the letters, the notes, the files the paper kept but never printed—and a man named Alvin Pease, who did not work here and was not asked, went down the stairs in the dark and carried out what he could reach.
What he could reach was the advertising ledgers.
This editor has therefore inherited a complete and unbroken record of what every business in this village charged for everything it sold between 1911 and 1955, and almost nothing of what anyone in it wrote to anyone else. When this newspaper cannot tell you why a thing was done, which happens more often than this editor would like, the answer is generally that the reason was on the floor.
This editor has considered, over a number of years, whether to record Mr. Pease's choice as an error, and has declined to, on the grounds that a man standing in cold water in the dark grabs what is nearest and heaviest, and that the question of what a historian would have preferred did not come up and could not have.
🔍 Fellow Sleuths Worth Following
February 1900. The square is strung with paper hearts for a three-night Valentine's square-dance-a-thon, and before sunrise on the second morning the caller is dead behind the Magnolia House—a man who collected other people's secrets and was tolerated rather than liked.
Stomped by Bessie Barr puts Minnie Mae Harper back on a case she has learned the hard way not to rush: everybody on that dance floor had a reason, everybody else is pointing, and the person it keeps pointing at is the one Minnie Mae most needs it not to be. Six church ladies, quilting needles, strong opinions, and a whole Texas county's worth of people who all know each other too well to be objective about any of it. If you'd like your turn-of-the-century cozy with six women in it who do not intend to be managed, that's this book.
FREE READS—SEPTEMBER TITLES
Ten days of rain is the best reading weather there is and I will not be taking questions. September's free shelf is still stocked. Browse September's Free Books.
Browse September’s Free Books →
🍽️ THE MAIN COURSE
There are college kids all over this issue. They floated a ditch, they named it, they made signs, and the worst that happened to any of them was a wet shoe.
In Harvest of Shadows and Dark Brews, a college kid drinks something somebody was handing out, and it goes the other way.
That's Book 3. It's the harvest one. By the time anybody in Maple Grove understands what was in that cup, Lisa is already further inside it than she should be, and the thing that makes the book work is that nobody involved is menacing. They're pleasant. They're helpful. They're so glad you came. Joe spends most of it unconvinced, right up until he very much isn't.
I wanted to write the book where the frightening thing is a group of people who only want to help you.
And if you jumped from Book 2 straight to Book 4—I know some of you did—this is the one you skipped.
New to Maple Grove? Start at the beginning—
Book 1, Scones, Secrets & Sabotage, is free →
✍️ Behind the Scenes
Ten days of rain and I got a cat out of it.
She turned up in the trees west of the house—tiny, soaked, and apparently done negotiating. Her name is Peanut. Charlie is tolerating her, which from Charlie is a standing ovation. She has spent the week pouncing on things that are not there and falling asleep mid-pounce, and I'm convinced she believes a roof and a full bowl are the greatest luck that has ever befallen an animal.
The granddaughters have had a harder week. The novelty of school wore off somewhere around Labor Day, and the tablets have started traveling to school in backpacks, which is how I know they are not supposed to be traveling anywhere. I've been confiscating them. The first afternoon, they asked me what they were supposed to do until their mom got home. I told them that when I was a kid we went outside and played until somebody called us in for dinner or it got dark, and that cartoons were on Saturday morning and that was the whole allotment. HayHay looked at me and said, "well, that's stupid."
She had a point. It has rained for ten days.
The next afternoon I found the two of them on the couch after snack, reading.
I did not say one word about it. I'm not a fool.
See you next Saturday, fellow sleuths—same town, new trouble.
— Willow 🌿
Meet Willow
Author, School Board member, and gluten-free baker. I write the Jenna McGregor mysteries from my home in Michigan, fueled by coffee and Peloton PRs.
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