Thaw turns snowman to no man
There’s a smelly, wet wad of red fabric in my front yard today, the sad remains of a moment of defiant happiness this winter.
The red heap is all that’s left of the snowman I built during one of our many snowstorms. The red scarf and maroon hat are wet because the snow now has a layer of slush on top of it; and it’s smelly because, apparently, mold can grow even in sub-zero temperatures.
My moment of happiness came two weekends ago, after one of the three-inch snowfalls we seemed to have an abundance of this winter. While shoveling the front steps, I noticed the snow clumping on my boots.
“Snowman snow!” I yelled up the stairs to my daughter. But that wasn’t reason enough for her to put on boots and mittens. And so, while she went off to visit friends, I went out to build me a man.
Frosty and his kin are usually true mesomorphs, with round and symmetrical bodies made of one ball stacked atop another. But this snow was not cooperating. When I tried to roll a ball it gathered grass, and a snowball the size I was planning would have been impossible to lift one onto another.
So, I started at the bottom and built it up with handfuls of snow, making a snow obelisk, wide on the bottom and skinnier toward the head. This gave the man an ugly thick neck, so I carved that part out with a garden trowel – a procedure that seemed a lot like the kind of plastic surgery I will soon need.
OK, so with that done, my snowman now looked like Mr. Peanut. I wrapped a bright red scarf around his neck and put a ski cap on his pointy head. Since my boots were messy and I didn’t want to wear them in the house, I fished for a nose and eyes in the junk drawer, easily reached from the floor mat by the back door.
The red cap from a bottle of liquid shoe polish would be the nose, and a wrecked pair of sunglasses eliminated the need for two eyes.
Back in the yard, with the nose and glasses in place and two sticks for arms and the metal handle of a bucket for a smile, the snowman was born. He was a cute, cute man.
A while later, my daughter arrived home, remarking my snowman looked “crazy.”
Well, that crazy man inspired some copycat snowman construction in the neighborhood. As soon as mine was up and smiling, a man in the apartment building across the street was out with his little son, building his own. Theirs had a traditional body, a totem pole of three big balls with a carrot for a nose and a green top hat. Yes, at almost 6 feet tall, theirs could kick my snowman’s lumpy butt, but mine had more personality.
But it’s all gone now, reduced to a soggy patch of red in the white landscape. I should probably go out there and collect his remains, but there’s something happy about that red mess.
Snowmen are melting all over town. Mine returned to the earth, becoming water to feed the crocuses waiting to have their turn at preening in the front yard.
A melting snowman means winter is almost over. There’s nothing sad about that.
Beth Dolinar can be reached at cootiej@aol.com.