Frosty Memories

When I was about four years old my divorced mother and I lived in a subsidized apartment complex. There were a bunch of identical three story buildings, each with about a dozen units inside. They were ugly, dark red brick buildings floating in a sea of a blacktop parking lots that surrounded them. 

I went walking around the complex one particularly cold Sunday in January, the week before that brought a lot of snow, and someone has made a snowman. The end of the week was sunny and warmer, and most of the snow had melted. The snowman has suffered. He was maybe half of his original size. But the previous night had been very cold so the melting snowman had turned into a block of ice. 

The makers had used some sort of faux jewels for eyes, a carrot for a nose, and has wrapped a scarf around his neck. The shiny red eyes and most of the carrot were entombed in the almost transparent head. The eyes glittered in the sun, a tantalizing prize for a young boy. I tried to kick the snowman over to claim my jewels, but my padded moon boots didn't even scuff the surface of his abdomen. I picked up the stick that had obviously been an arm, now released from the melted body, and broke it in half with only a few whacks to his head. Well, this clearly wasn't going to work. 

The afternoon wore on and the winter sun dipped lower in the sky quickly. I had restored to a pointed rock, slowly chiseling my way into the snowman's face over the course of at least an hour. The rock caused the ice to fracture and turn white and cloudy at the impact site. It was becoming difficult to see the jewels. No longer were they faceted, glittering temptation, they were instead fuzzy red blurs tantalizingly close to the surface, but still out of reach. 

The sun had descended below the horizon and the streetlights in the parking lots sputtered and flickered to life, casting the world in a yellow-orange glow. 

"There you are!" The sound of my mother's voice startled me and I dropped my rock. "Where the hell have you been?" She asked in a huff. Obviously I'd been right here. Where else could I possibly have been? She grabbed my arm and marched me past several buildings back to our unit. 

The next day was warmer, and after lunch I made my way back outside to continue my excavation. The snowman has fallen over at some point. The bottom sphere was no more than a lump of slush no higher than my knee. Where torso and head fell was no more than a wet spot on the grass with half a carrot and a muddy scarf and nothing more.

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