Just when it seemed like every last snowflake was about to melt away – boom, another storm comes and wipes those thoughts away. Such is the life of a New Englander, I guess.
But rather than sit around whining and complaining about having to shovel, scrape and salt, you should use this opportunity to have some fun. After all, how many types of precipitation can you actually play with?
You may have seen a feature in last week’s Monitor about a really high-end igloo someone built in Loudon. That thing was pretty intense, complete with lights, a TV and a solid ice door.
Because not all of us have that kind of skill when it comes to snow, this Go Try It will focus on one of the easier snow projects one can make: a snowman.
The snowman may be the official mascot of winter, and it can also be a source of pride. If you build a nice, big snowman in your front yard, it puts pressure on your neighbors to step up their game, which then puts pressure on their neighbors, and so on. The next thing you know, you have an entire neighborhood of larger-than-life snowpeople (don’t want to exclude the many snowwomen that are also built every winter).
In my case, we went to the in-laws to build a snowman, since our yard has more than a few dog-supplied land mines hiding just beneath the snow (and although they could have been used for eyes, it was ultimately deemed a bad idea). This yard, on Harvard Street, had loads of pristine, wet, sticky snow, exactly the kind you want for snowman-making.
This was to be my daughter Julia’s first time making a snowman, and she didn’t quite understand that we wanted her to do some of the work. Her idea of helping was throwing some snowballs on the ground every once in a while, which, admittedly, did seem to make the ordeal more exciting.
This snow was perfect for the job. Every handful clung together like Play-Doh and begged to be packed together. If you could custom order a supply of snow to make snowmen out of, this would have been it.
Because the snow was so easy to work with, the snowman only took about 15 minutes to make.
Apart from snow, sticks were used for arms, stones made up his buttons and eyes, a baseball cap went on the head and a carrot, mysteriously missing the following morning, went in the center of the face.
Since the snowman was built while the snow was still falling, I went to check on him in the morning to make sure he made it through the night. When I got there, I noticed that you could hardly recognize it as a snowman – all of his key features were blanketed under a fresh layer of snow.
Too proud to let this stand, I got out of my car, donned some gloves and went to work on the cleanup effort. A pile of snow had accumulated behind the snowman’s neck, making it look like he was wearing one of those braces some NFL linemen wear to prevent their necks from snapping back. His hat was also completely invisible, needing just a few swipes of the hand to clear.
Finally, I smoothed off some jagged edges around the bottom and set off to work, confident that we now had the best snowman on the block.
