The Fifth Snowman in the Front Yard

Earl

Earl lived next door, in the white house with the green shutters. He was seventy-nine, and he’d lived in that house for fifty-one years. He’d milked cows on a dairy farm east of town for most of his life and moved into town when his knees told him to.

He was a quiet man. He shoveled his own walk every morning at six and never let me do it, and he fixed my storm door once without asking and wouldn’t take anything for it, not even a pie.

I saw his shape go past his kitchen window, and then go past again. I figured he was getting up for coffee. Milkers never sleep past four, he’d told me once. Your body doesn’t forget.

Brody and Lily

Brody’s snowman was the hardest, because by then my arms were done. I had to roll his middle three times because it kept splitting on me. I said a word I don’t usually say, under my breath, to a ball of snow.

Brody is six. He’s the one who runs into every room at full speed and asks a question before he’s all the way in the door. I made his snowman with its arms up high, like he was about to grab something.

The arms came from the box elder at the corner of the lot. I’d broken off a whole armload of branches the week before when they came down in a wind. I’d meant to burn them in the spring.

Lily’s was the smallest, but it was still taller than she is. She’s four, and very serious, and she likes everything to match. So I gave hers two little branches that were exactly the same length, and I checked them twice.

For the eyes I used buttons from my grandma’s button tin, which lives in my top drawer. For the noses I used baby carrots from the bag in the refrigerator. I couldn’t spare whole ones. Baby carrots were what I had.

The scarves

Then I went back in for the scarves.

I had a red one my mom knit me, and a purple Vikings scarf of Jace’s from a game we’d never actually gone to. I had a pink and white one of Lily’s with the fringe coming loose, and a gray one that had been Cody’s.

He’d left it on the hook by the back door when he moved out, and I’d never moved it. I didn’t want to think too hard about why I picked it up that night. I put it on Brody’s snowman, because Brody looks the most like his dad.

Then I got the signs.

The presents

I had wrapped the signs a week before, in white butcher paper I’d brought home from the deli. It’s the same paper we wrap the pound of ham in, and I’d tied each one with red baker’s twine, and drawn a little star in the corner with a marker.

I set each sign across a snowman’s stick arms, and then I packed snow around the place where the sign met the branch, like a pair of mittens holding on to it. Then I poured a little warm water on the mittens so the signs wouldn’t slip.

By the time I set Lily’s sign in place, it was ten past six. I had been out there for three hours. My hands had stopped feeling like hands about an hour before that.

I stood at the end of the walk and looked at them. Four snowmen in a row, tallest to smallest, in four scarves, each one holding a present wrapped in deli paper.

I’d like to tell you I felt proud. Mostly I felt cold, and very tired, and a little bit foolish, a grown woman in pajama pants at six in the morning, crying over snow.

Then I went in, and peeled off my wet socks, and sat on the bathroom floor with the door shut and cried as quietly as I have ever done anything.