Snow Person

East of our place on Lyell Avenue, in the side yard of a small tan ranch house, there stands a huge mound of snow nearly as tall as the roof of the house. At first we thought it was one of those inflatable lawn decorations in the shape of a snowman, but when the shape began to change, we realized it was a home-made honest-to-goodness real live snow person manually created by person or persons unknown.

This gigantic snowperson wears a blue waste basket on its head for a hat, some kind of wood shingles for a mouth, and two huge snowballs for feet. The snow monster sports a blue and gray scarf about it's neck and bare branches for arms. The curious thing is that there are no eyes! I wonder if they put carrots there and the local mammal population made off with them?

The oddest thing about the poor dearie is the melt factor. The shape is much less like three snowballs stacked one on the other and much more of a triangular monolith with melted runoff filling in the cracks. All this is covered with a fuzzy coating of fluffy new snow, giving it a truly odd appearance.

It seems so lonely plunked down there in the middle of nowhere without any indication of children living nearby, as if some teenage prankster constructed it when no one was looking, just for a joke. My puzzlement is how they got the thing so tall? Did they use ladders? Did they hoist the heavy snow up with shovels? Did someone climb up the bottom layers to add to the top? In its own way, it is a small but amazing feat of engineering, cleverly done perhaps by college students, surely not by children.

I'm not quite sure what to make of monster snowperson. Everytime I drive past, I stare at the darn thing, noting the recent changes of either melt or snow additions. It will be interesting to see the fate of a larger than life snow creation.