When I was a kid we built snowmen, and the one I remember most, for some reason, is one my father helped us build during the blizzard of 1978. I’m assuming it was during this time, but maybe I’m compressing every snowstorm into the memory of the big one in 1978, when we could have jumped into the snow from the top of our house on Johnson Avenue and landed safely in a heavenly cloud of powder. I’m not just compressing snowstorms, either, but also the physical appearance of my father, who, in his best days, sported a gorgeous, full, chestnut brown mustache.
He was a handsome and fearsome man, and we built that snowman together that day. I know my mother was there, and Billy was there. If it was 1978, Jeffrey would have been just born, but I don’t remember him being there. The snowman was an ordinary one, but it had what appeared to be a bruise on its foundation. In other words, if a snowman is built of three progressively smaller snow mounds, one atop the other, the one with the bruise was the bottom snow mound. I remember my father made a comment to my mother about the bruise, which was a little brown area on the snow, claiming that the snowman must be pregnant. My mother laughed at him, as she does often when my father gets going with his jokes. Despite the man’s severity through most of our youth, he could have my mother laughing so hysterically that it would send her into coughing fits, tears streaming down her beautiful face.
I might be a remembering a photograph, too, come to think of it, because I’m getting an image of a photograph. My mother must have taken the picture, because I cannot remember one single instance when my father ever had a camera in his hand. A vision of him drawing a camera to his eye to take a snapshot is completely foreign to me.
If they took a picture of this strange snowman, it strikes me as an anomaly not unlike a UFO sighting. Why take a picture of a snowman with a brown spot on the bottom snow mound? What does a brown mark have to do with being pregnant? It makes no sense.
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