Keeping in theme with last week’s post about simple things that make life more enjoyable, I want to talk about one of the most multi-purpose things of all: snow.
I mean, think about it. You can make shapes out of it, make shapes in it, throw it, hide behind it… Heck, you can even eat it. I used to. Ugh, now I’m craving snow. Look what you’ve done, blog post. Look what you’ve done.
But there are lots of things that you don’t really think about that you can do with snow. Point in case: sculpture. People make snowmen all the time, sure, and forts too, but that’s it. Really? You have nature’s Play-Doh and all you’ve made out of it are a pile of balls with a carrot in it and a slapped together wall from the snow you shoveled off your driveway? The way we made forts, I’m not sure it even counts as sculpture. We literally just hid behind the piles we had removed from blocking in the cars. Nah. Make something interesting! Little snow bunnies, birds, bananas… Whatever you want, but make something unique!
Going back to forts… there’s an alternative for that too. My cousins and I were too lazy to build out own forts, so we just used the climbing tower in the backyard instead. That isn’t to say that we didn’t incorporate snow… we did. We just had a sturdier base. We fortified the tower with packed snow between the wooden boards in the walls to block incoming snowballs, between the footholds in the climbing wall to make it unpassable, and rubbed melting fistfuls of the stuff on the monkey bars and slides (all of us were quite good at climbing slides, so this was indeed a necessary step in fort defense).
Even unused, snow, like much else in nature, is an amazing gift if only for beauty. When undisturbed upon tree branches and fields, it is a truly marvelous sight. It is more than nature’s toybox. It is nature’s way of decorating for the holidays. And to those people too far south for snow: I’m sorry. You’re missing out. There’s not much to say past that.
