Making a snowman

I like the kind of snow that's close to rain and comes down in big, moist flakes.  That's the sort of snow that's suitable for snowballs and snowmen.  Yet I like just the feel of it as it comes down.

But it doesn't last long.  Either it'll melt or it'll freeze overnight, in which latter case it turns into icy snow, my least favourite type.  As the Robert Frost poem goes, "Nothing gold can stay."

Too bad that this sort of snow often falls in April, when people are tired of snow and waiting for spring to come. (You appreciate it more when it falls in the autumn.) In New Brunswick it sometimes snows in May!

Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird has a funny scene where the kids build a snowman. (Since this is Alabama, they have to make its core from potting soil and coat it with a layer of snow.) The snowman looks a lot like a male neighbour, so their father gives it a woman's hat so the neighbour won't be offended!  Later a female neighbour calls it a hermaphrodite.

Hans Christian Andersen wrote another wonderful story, "The Snowman." It's about an outdoor snowman who looks inside a window, sees a hot stove and feels an odd love for it!  After he melts it turns out that his backbone was made from the stove's coal shovel.  In a way, we're all snowmen living out a few days and looking in the window...