Last week’s perfect packing snow provided raw material for many neighbors’ creativity, which I’m still discovering as the dog and I take our morning walks. Today, for instance, revealed a snow bear in someone’s front yard. Blimpy Burgers used to be adorned with snow bears during the winter; they were smallish and charming, like little cartoons. This bear was full sized and more like a real bear. Its muzzle, in particular, was wonderful. Ordinary packing snow could not have produced such a fine, cantilevered schnoz. This required truly excellent packing snow.
As we were coming up the hill on the way home, I noticed a snowperson having a bit of a sit-down on a garden bench, leaning its snowy back up against a tree. It looked peaceful in repose. Parents of youngsters taking piano lessons in that house used to sit on that bench, which wraps around the tree. Perhaps the snowperson had a snowchild inside taking lessons, too.
Yesterday, we passed a truly outstanding snow kayaker on Bunker Hill. The base looks to be a real kayak left out to gather snow during the storm. Its shape and edges are perfect. The snowperson is seated in the kayak and only two snowballs tall, as its legs are presumably inside the kayak. It’s wearing a red knit hat, and holding a real kayak paddle across its lap. So original and so well executed. It made me laugh out loud with pleasure.
Elsewhere in the neighborhood is a four-snowball snowperson. It’s wearing a hat made of snow, and the fourth snowball is the pom-pom of the hat. A Taiwanese friend tells me that children where she comes from build snowpeople with only two snowballs—body and head. In fact, she asked me what our third snowball represents. I wonder if Chinese children living here use two snowballs or three. My guess is, at least around here, three, as we have many, many international students and researchers and professionals in Ann Arbor, and I don’t recall seeing any two-snowball snowpeople over the years.
Jennifer Ramirez, an art teacher in the Detroit suburb of Madison Heights, built snow sharks on her front lawn. The Detroit Free Press, one of the many news outlets that covered the story, reports they look like great whites. They do, too. Ramirez even colored them, using food coloring that she sprayed on. Their teeth are made of icicles. They look to be swimming around and surging from the water. One has only a dorsal fin showing. The Freep even listed Ramirez’s street, so that admirers can join the throngs of neighbors stopping by to pose with the sharks and take pictures.
Last week, the day it snowed from early morning until evening, hundreds of people had a snow fight on the University of Michigan Diag, the center of Main Campus. Most of them were students, of course, but other people joined in the fun, too, including Santa Ono, the president of the university, who received a personal invitation and got hit with at least one personal snowball.
Messages about the planned melee started appearing in social media in the morning. The pictures I’ve seen show masses of excited, happy people throwing snowballs and ducking others while the snow fell and fell and fell. Additional smaller skirmishes sprang up around the big one. Other activities did, also. Some people built a snow fort around the hallowed Block M in the middle of the Diag. Others built snowmen. Still others built a monumental snowball and rolled it from the Diag, past the art museum, and across the street into the Law Quad. Traffic on South University stopped to let the behemoth cross, and various people, including at least one university administrator, awaited the arrival of the triumphal procession.
This morning, as the dog and I walked through the woods by Thurston Pond, we heard shhh, shhh, shhh, shhh. Someone was skating around the edge of the pond, quite possibly the first skater there this winter. I don’t know whether the person was a man or a woman—the sun was in our eyes. But the strides were long and sure as he or she made leisurely circuits of the quiet pond on this bright, cold February day. The only other sounds in the woods were a woodpecker rat-a-tatting high on a tree and the clear call of a cardinal farther along. The skater could probably hear ice noises as well.
Sturgeon season on Black Lake starts—and probably ends–on Saturday.
It’s great to live in Michigan. Winter is finally here, and the sun is shining. There is much to celebrate.
3 February 2023