Mack Williams: Memories of snowmen

The magnitude of our recent snows has now reached the extent that they remind me of snows in the 1950s and early 1960s when I was growing up on Old Concord Road.

And they herald the return of an old friend, the snowman.

In recent years, there are reports of the numbers of polar bears decreasing in some areas. It seemed, until the arrival of the most recent snows, as if the snowman had become extinct, joining a list of dwindling and extinct creatures.

The situation had even deteriorated to the point that, prior to these recent voluminous snows, the only snowmen seen were "store-bought," made of plastic and complete with their own built-in fan to keep them inflated and standing in the front yard.

But now there is no cause for worry. The snowmen are back! They are back from extinction, not through a captive breeding program like the polar bear, but by the simple prerequisites of cold temperature and abundant moisture.

In those winters of the 1950s and '60s, just as now, the best snowmen were always made with wet, clumpy snow. I remember fashioning something that resembled a mega-snowball with which to begin. I would then start pushing and rolling it in the snow, making it larger and larger. In an appropriately wet snow, the rolled snow looked like the layers of a rolled blanket, the snow coming up off of the ground like a piece of whole cloth.

In those areas of the yard where the bottom-most layer of snow became the outermost layer of the rolled "snow blanket," a clear path of ground could be seen, sometimes revealing some leaves which I might have missed during leaf-raking and leaf-burning time, along with the ever-present rocks of my old front yard.

In the snowman's construction, when this roll of snow was set up resembling a tree stump, in preparation for more, the wrapped roll of snow had growth rings just like a stump. Only in this case, the number of rings were related to the snowman's girth instead of its age.

My snowmen's bodies were all constructed in a fashion similar to that of an insect with a head, thorax and abdomen. Polar bears can walk about, but snowmen are static. Is this because snowmen are only snow, or is it because we never build them a pair of legs?

Those three parts, along with the snowmen's ears, I made of snow. Pieces of coal from our old coal pile became the eyes of the snowmen. I suspect the availability of coal for such "snow art" has diminished since I was a child. It's probably only available now if one happens to live near a railroad track where hopper-cars overfilled with coal frequently rumble by.

The nose was constructed from a carrot, although the vitamin A in it is much more beneficial to the sense of sight than that of smell. I made the arms out of branches and the hair out of small broken twigs. Sometimes I leaned a broom against him, making it appear that although schools, stores, etc., were closed due to the snow, he was still working.

My snowman was kind of like my Mr. Potato Head, which I made out of an actual potato. Only the appendages and attached facial features remained following the meltdown of the snowman — like the decomposition of the potato.

Those snowmen, constructed in my youth, have of course been gone for many years, most within little over a week following their making. Since I formed their ears from snow, their sense of hearing has melted, later joined by the decomposition of their carrot sense of smell, and much later, their branching sense of touch.

My many snowmen are gone. Perhaps after all these years, they may continue to look out on life from those many little bits of coal scattered about my old front yard, coal resembling the small stones around them, except that these little black rocks once could see.