There's No Business Like Snow Business

Years ago, my friend Jane sent me a Polaroid of a sculpture her husband had just finished… It was a replica of “The Kiss” – and it was built out of snow. When I find the Polaroid, I’ll post it for you… It was pretty cool.


It made me think of all the amazing artists who have created temporary art – most notably – Andy Goldsworthy. He makes art that falls down, gets washed away, blown away, rotted out, and melted. He makes chains of leaves, pinned together with thorns that he releases down streams. He sculpts hollow snowballs. He makes arches from ice… He’s well worth looking up. His artwork completely changed the way I feel about art – because it gave me a new appreciation of the way things change – and the beauty of the moment.

All this to say, I have a large yard… On which, two nights ago, someone built a large snowman. I first noticed him while driving to work yesterday morning. He was somewhat shocking, actually...

The fact that the snowman was built on my yard isn’t the problem. The fact that they stuck an 8-foot stick into the middle of the bottom snowball (no pun intended… Please. If I’d said “lowest snow boulder” y’all would have made a bigger deal out of it.) The snowman, other than that – was about what you'd expect.

I drove away – thinking many things. Among them, “I wonder if anyone believes that I had embellished the snowman?” “I wonder if we’ll see him in the newspaper, arrested for exposing himself in my yard…” But mostly - I wish I’d had a camera with me – because it would have made this story a lot funnier.

By the time I drove home that evening, someone who had an anti-snowman (or anti-large-stick) bias, nearly obliterated all traces. What remained was the largest snowball sans snow-manhood. I know I shouldn’t laugh… but admit it. It’s kind of amusing, in that bathroom humor sort of way.