Summer Snowman

"Uh, there's a snowman melting outside on the driveway," Kyle announced on the first day of July.

"WHAT?" I practically plummeted down the stairs  to go through the garage. "What did you do?" 

I marched into the blinding sunlight. There it was, the small snowman James and I built last winter and tucked into the freezer for safe-keeping, now not at all safe and shrinking by the second. Two sticks, a fleece scrap and a single blue Froot Loop eye were all that suggested the former glory of the dripping ice blocks. I knew exactly what happened -- I'd asked Kyle to look for a loaf of bread in the downstairs freezer, and this is what he pulled out instead -- I just didn't know why.

But, boy, I wanted to find out. "Why did you this? What were you thinking?" I drilled into him as I tried to reform the man, haphazardly placing the blocks atop each other again. "This was important to me!"

Photo: Our rehabilitated Summer Snowman.

Kyle, following closely behind me from staircase to driveway to freezer, where I put the salvaged snowman to mend, must have thought I was nuts. Hard to say who was losing their cool faster, the snowman or Mom. 

Even as all this was unfolding I was startled by my absurdly strong reaction too. What was wrong with me? I'd had a super sensitive, emotional week, maybe that influenced it. Lately I've felt that my ideas, my dreams, my feelings, my worries, my you-name-it are considered trivial. Maybe the snowman's meltdown brought this to a head, and that's why I took it so personally.

Yet the whole experience also spoke of perspective. "When you see a snowman in the freezer, you don't think that you have to ask permission to destroy it," Kyle countered during my outbursts. His teenage logic was funny then, it is now too.

It wasn't exactly a watershed moment (that distinction is the snowman's alone), but my reaction showed me I need to do better about taking things in stride. I need to take care of myself physically and emotionally so something so small can't land such a blow. I need to stop making mountains out of snowflakes.

I wasn't planning on keeping the snowman forever, of course.  The whole exercise was prompted by my desire to make literature come alive for my children. I read "The Summer Snowman" by Gene Zion to James and his neighbor preschool group the day we built the man and socked him away in cold storage. Following the plot, I planned to bring the snowman out to celebrate the 4th of July with us as we read the book again.

We did, and it was fun. That's all that matters. I recommend reading this book with your children, minus the whole psychoanalysis.

*My friend Katrina and I once built a snowman together and stored him in the freezer. At our workplace freezer, I should add, when we were in college.