We had a lot to accomplish today in anticipation of our upcoming trip to New York City- but one thing which Kathy said was absolutely essential was that our snowmen disappear. Most people I know don’t have snowmen still up the day after Easter- but then again, most years we don’t have eleven inches of snow on Good Friday. (And just for the record, there is a family in our neighborhood who took down their Christmas tree – their REAL Christmas tree – on Easter Sunday. We saw it with our own eyes. So we’re not the only folks around here wtih an odd attachment to their Christmas decorations.)
I don’t know when we started collecting snowmen, but we seem to own more than fifty of them in all shapes and sizes, and we had just a portion of them on display in our front foyer. By the way, I happen to think that there are a lot of crummy-looking snowmen out there for sale- and I think it’s because a snowman is a very simple figure to draw or create (unlike, for instance, Santa Claus) and so a lot of people with little or no artistic talent might still try their hand at making snowmen. But because of its very simplicity, there’s also a neat range of possibilities for snowmen- and our little mountain of them shows at least some of the neat things that can be done with them.
I think one reason why we were so determined to put our snowmen away once and for all is our perhaps-paranoid sense that as long as we had the snowmen out, it was going to be winter in Wisconsin, no matter what the calendar said. It’s a little bit like the lovebirds in the Alfred Hitchcock horror classic “The Birds.” We are given the distinct impression that those mild-looking lovebirds have something to do with the frightening wave of bird attacks being visited on the citizens of Bodega Bay, California. Call us crazy buyt we’re hoping that putting our snowmen away will be the crucial catalyst in spring finally coming, once and for all. Speaking of snowmen, probably the best thing we’ve done is put away our cute wooden snowman on a tall stake with the words “Let it Snow” emblazoned on a little wooden plaque. Having this thing up in our yard in mid-March is a little like having a “Kick me” sign taped to your behind and then walking through a gym of soccer players. It just doesn’t make sense to unnecessarily tempt fate.