Snowmen of Yore
My brain is a pile of mush. Truly. I have a pad of paper next to my computer because I don’t trust my short-term memory. Specific memories are hard to find in all the mush. Sometimes they burble to the surface at random times, or sparked by a random word.
Snow.
There’s this one December morning that stands out brilliantly. I had graduated high school two years before, and I worked part time at one of the two bakeries in town. I had this particular morning off and for some goofy reason I was awake really early. I remember waking up, seeing that tell-tale white blinginess shining through the closed blinds, scrambling and tripping over the bed to open the drapes like the inner kid I am, to behold the winter wonderland outside.
There were about five inches on the ground, pristine, undisturbed by vehicles, human or animal feet. As a kid, I felt that was the most precious time to behold snow, when it was new, and thick, crystals twinkling like diamonds in the morning sun, unmarred by even a single tire track or footprint. I knew it wouldn’t stay that way, and this particular morning, I stared at it to commit it to memory. It was as if I was saying to myself, “If you’re only going to recall one particular snowy scene in your childhood home’s front yard, then let this moment of perfection be that memory.”
I stood at the front door in bare feet, baggy shirt, and stretchy pants, my usual sleepwear, and just drank in the scene for a moment. And then I had an idea, and dashed inside to put on a coat, grab a pair of gloves, threw on my boots without putting socks on, and dashed back out. I was so very careful to walk as close to the house as I could, as I made my way from the front porch to the garage, staying under the eaves where the least amount of snow had fallen. I made no tracks as I snuck over to the front lawn.
As I can never help myself, I dipped one gloveless hand into the snow, my fingers splayed, just barely touching the surface of the thick snow resting upon the front lawn. My warm fingers melted the snow quickly, and my hand began to sink into it. The snow was soft, and the cold didn’t become immediately apparent. It was only by holding my hand there, sinking slowly into the drift, that my skin began to tingle, and my capillaries to contract and my fingers to grow painfully cold.
I curled my fingers into claw-like things, shoving them into the snow, grabbing a handful of the frozen precipitation. I used my other ungloved hand to help smoosh the stuff into a ball, and then flung it into the short trees lining the driveway, grinning to myself as a little snow fell off the boughs the snowball had dislodged.
My mom had an early morning work shift, and the car was sitting next to the garage, waiting for her to climb in and go to work. It was a Buick, with one of those gawdy round hood ornaments on the front hood. I looked at the car, regarded the hood ornament, and decided that mom might appreciate a different hood ornament. I shoved my hands, which were now protesting with the cold, into my fingered gloves, and grabbed a fresh ball of snow, packing it tight, and then crafting it around the hood ornament so that it was a ball. I made a smaller ball and put that on top, followed by a sequentially smaller ball, fitted on top. I knew the miniature snowman would probably not survive its harrowing trip to her workplace, but I packed more snow around each section, as much as I could while retaining the snowman shape. I grabbed some pebbles from the gravel next to the living room window, some sticks, and decked out that sucker. I think we even had baby carrots in the fridge, and one became its nose.
Snickering to myself, I wandered back inside and waited for my mother to notice my handiwork. She went out to warm up the car before work, came back inside, shook her head at me, and declared that she wouldn’t be responsible for the state of the snowman as she drove to work.
Later that day, she returned home after work, and I was very amused to find that the snow-hood ornament had not only survived the trip to work, but also the trip back. She said several people made comments about the weird snowman on that red car in the parking lot. She was quite amused.
I remember another year, in which I made my own homage to a well-known Calvin and Hobbes comic strip, to amuse my dad. It took hours, and I finished it all before he woke up. I believe he called a few friends to come over and view the tableau. I think it was the one with the abdomen of a snowman on the car hood.
There was the one year that all the neighborhood kids strived to make the Biggest Snowman Evar. We all helped push this huge snow-boulder, taller than US, around the block, picking up every stray bit of snow we could off the roadway. Well, if the town’s few snowplows weren’t going to clear our streets, we would. I seem to recall that it became too heavy to roll around that last corner, and so we left it abandoned on the side of the road neighboring an unused, fenced-off plot of land. We cheered as the snow melted, and it remained. The last bit of white on the wet grass finally disappeared a month later, hehe. I remember a few of the older kids trying valiantly to place a slightly smaller but still monstrous ball on top, and failing miserably. It became the Snowman in Supine Repose. *smirks*
Lotsa good memories regarding snowmen. I didn’t even have to dig out my pad of paper.
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Challenge yourself to Holidailies 2009 by writing one entry each day in December.
