i.

Late November

    I can’t tell you how many hours Kim and I have spent on our snowman. We started in early October, months before the first significant snowfall (which as I write this in late November has not yet occurred).

    Contrary to what you believed as a child, building a snowman requires a lot of careful planning. Once we learned that the recovery from Kim’s surgery would keep us in Michigan for the winter, the planning began. What’s so great about Florida in the winter, anyway? You can’t build a snowman out of sand. Although Kim probably could . . ..

    The planning, so far, consists of gathering some sticks that would be useful for the arms. We are saving them in our garage, which now has room since we hung our unique Christmas tree from the ceiling last week. We also purchased a straw hat from the Goodwill recycle shop – perfect because the straw brim will hold a lot of bird seed, and we can pin it to the head with a knitting needle. We have not yet found the perfect scarf or mittens.

    The location of the tree involved further planning. One consideration was the right background for the photographs that Kim was planning to take. Back in October I figured, incorrectly, that Kim would still be fairly immobilized in her seat looking out to our back yard. I also figured, also incorrectly, that she would not yet be able to lift her 100-400mm lens. So we picked a nice spot between the crabapple tree and the antique watering can surrounded by bunny statues. I moved a couple of rocks to make the scene more appealing. We worried briefly that the birdseed on the ground would be the wrong color for the photo, but then we realized – Duh! –that it would be covered with snow.

    We are also certain that we want the surface of the snowman to be nothing but snow, along with the adornments and facial features we supply. This means that when we roll the perfect snow into the three white spheres for head, upper body and lower body, that no old brown leaves flaw the appearance like a bad case of all-body acne. And this means that I rake the lawn every week or so in case some leaves have drifted into our back yard from our neighbor’s trees.

    We are still wrestling with a logistical problem. The perfect snowman should sit on a perfect snowy ground, which means No Footprints. One solution is to have the snow resume after we have constructed the snowman. Possible, but that leaves a lot to chance. Another solution is to have me construct the three elements in the far back yard, roll them into place, and then back out on the same path, brushing snow over my prints. This option might involve my climbing a fence to reach the far back yard, but men have done a lot more when driven by love.

    Our third option involves a helicopter.

    With all of this planning, you’d think we’d have come up with an idea of what our snowman will look like. We know it will have some traditional features: carrot nose (though we are considering the just right sweet potato), possibly a pipe (if we can fill it with peanut butter for the birds and construct it so it will hold their weight), possibly some clothing (Kim has been eyeing items in my closet of which she is not especially fond). But what about the pose?

    I have briefly considered some traditional options, though standing there with arms extended and an idiotic grin seems a bit lame, unless we see it as a parody of a snowman, or perhaps a Portrait of the Artist’s Husband. I wanted to do a snow gator, modeled after the half-submerged yard art that our Florida neighbors have, but that idea was not taken seriously (nor was it, I had Kim believe, offered seriously). Our granddaughter suggested a snow family, but as the Chief Laborer of the project, I pretended not to hear her. When our friend Steven sent us photographs of clever and wacky snow sculptures, we went back to more traditional poses, though Kim and I have yet to discuss them. I suspect she has something in mind.

    But, I ask myself, what if it doesn’t snow? Or if the snow is mixed with sleet? Or if it comes in the form of a below zero blizzard with high winds and no sticking power? I dismiss these worries because we are now Florida residents, wintering in Michigan, and it just has to snow. And it will be perfect.

    To help move things along, I shoveled the driveway the other night. No, it had not snowed—just enough dust so I could usually keep track of where I’d pushed the shovel. (This, like everything I’ve written here, is true.) And it worked, for when I came back inside, Kim suggested that it was a good time to have a drink out on the porch under the Christmas tree. But that’s another story.

    Meanwhile, it is starting to snow, so I’d better rake the yard.

ii.

Late February

    My concern that it might not snow enough for a snowman in the winter of 2013-4 was, to put it mildly, mistaken. As of this writing toward the end of February we have had over six feet of snow, and despite a couple of recent days above the freezing mark, much of it is still very much in evidence. Kim did her snow-dance back in November. Some were skeptical of her snow-dancing powers. The skeptics have been silenced – possibly from all that snow-shoveling.

                        Here is our living snowman in action.

        We built our first snowpersons shortly after Kim danced – and it wasn’t even her best dance, as she was recovering from her mastectomy and not eager to wave her arms about. But what she did was enough. We had about six inches, and the next day warmed enough to make the snow sticky. We decided, since this might be the only snow of the winter, to build the bodies in the shade of the large spruce tree next to the driveway, and we thought it best to build two, Mr. and Mrs. Frosty.

We had to roll the torso balls and heads in the back yard, where the snow was pure, and then drag them to their station on a saucer sled. The snow was such good packing that our snowfolks ended up a little more than life size, and it proved hard to place the upper bodies on the lower. But we did it.

       

            Cute, perhaps, but not well engineered. Temperatures warmed during the night, and our creations were leaning precariously during the early morning hours and had sprawled into the driveway by breakfast – only a memory when Genne’ and Reilly came to visit a few days later. But they were a loving couple during their few hours of life. And they were in a way the parents of the series of offspring to come.

iii.

Early April

    We had a good snowfall in January, followed by the right kind of 33-degree day that leads to good packing. We decided to relocate the site of our snow-family so that we could see, and Kim could photograph, it from our breakfast nook window. So what, we thought, if it weren’t under a tree, protected from the heat of the sun? Even if we only had a day or two of shooting before the inevitable January Thaw, we would make the best of it. We did not know at the time of the pending Polar Vortex with days of sub-zero temperatures. Our real January Thaw did not happen until March. We also made it smaller than life size so that it was less likely to collapse.

    The first consideration in any snowman construction is that it be bird-friendly. This meant, for starters, loading the brim of the straw hat with bird-seed.

But of course, bird-friendly means squirrel friendly . . .

and cat-friendly.

    Kim, still healing from her surgeries, opened a window to direct my placing of the three balls of snow. I of course had to roll them in the snow behind the garage so no traces of ruts or tracks would show in the photographs. I guess the idea is that the snowman just sort-of popped up out of virgin snow rather than actually being constructed. The sticks that had served Mr. and Mrs. Frosty so well were transplanted as arms. I attached the button eyes, hat, and vegetable nose (first a sweet potato, later a series of carrots) with wooden toothpicks. As the winter wore on, the toothpicks were replaced by 10-inch metal rods that had some sort of kitchen function before they found their true calling.

    Even with day after day of sub-freezing temperatures, you don’t just build a snowman and then let it stand. At least, you don’t do that at our house! In addition to the constant maintenance – not so much shoring up the engineering of the structure as cleaning up bird-seed debris so Kim would not have to remove it with Photoshop, as well as relocating the seed to make it invisible through her camera’s viewfinder.

And then we had a series of siblings to dress and photograph. They included:

A gramma who looks not at all like Kim except for the bird’s nest she is holding.

Grampa Mike - note hat and suspenders.

Valentine’s SnowClown, made for the occasion.

A mouse, visited by a crow.

And what better way to get through those long winter nights than with a bottle of wine. Or two. Of course, you sometimes pay a price.

And your spouse may not approve . . ..

As the winter wore on, the snowman began to merge with the snowy environment. Features fell away, and the once shapely form began to sag.

until soon it had all but disappeared.

except for the memory . . ..

    We had been talking for years about spending a winter in Michigan so we could experience the snow. Though we both grew up in the north, we had not seen snow for thirteen years. Well, we made up for that gap in the winter of 2013-4, where we had over 90 inches of snow and temperatures down to -18. People have been known to develop “cabin fever” when trapped indoors, but that didn’t happen to us, thanks in large part to the steady stream of visitors in our back yard.