The snow on Chandler's Green squeaks underfoot with a note like a wet finger on a glass, and by seven in the morning the whole green is humming with it. Wilhelmina Pike, who keeps the village school, crosses it every day with a satchel and a thermos, and that is how I came to spend a working day with her in December, watching what the snow folk do to a schoolteacher's morning.
At a quarter to seven, her front step is dusted clean and a line of coal buttons lies along the rail, laid out in a row like a hand of cards. She sweeps them into her apron pocket. "They leave me one every day," she said. "They think I'm collecting." By seven she is on the green, where a snowman five feet tall is dancing alone among the benches with his twig arms flung wide, a string of colored lights swinging at his waist, a dented copper pot on his head with a sprig of holly in its brim. He is built of three stacked snowballs with a carrot nose, a pebble grin and a red mitten on one hand, and he keeps time to something nobody else can hear. She waves and he waves back with the mitten.
Frosty characters turn up in every dooryard around Nailer's Yard, and the village has a use for all of them. One keeps the sledding hill smooth. One stands guard at the wreath stall and tips his hat to buyers. A third, the oldest, is consulted by the children before any snowball fight. Whether they are alive in the way that dogs and children are alive I cannot say; they eat nothing I could see, though cups of cocoa left on the step are found cooled and untouched at dawn, with the steam gone. Wilhelmina's day goes on in the ordinary way: nobody calls the children in, and they arrive when they have finished dancing. By dusk the snowman is back, on the bench by the school gate, watching the lamplighter, and when she locks up he follows her to her step and sits there until she closes the door.
The one exception is March. Every snow figure melts in the first warm week, and every one of them knows it, and the one by the school gate is the only one I have seen that does not seem to mind. It was still there on the first of April, last year, in a puddle, wearing the pot.
- Classification
- Animate snow figure
- Habitat
- Village greens, dooryards, snowy lanes
- Danger
- Minimal
- Size
- 5 ft tall, three stacked snowballs
- Activity
- Seasonal
- Realm
- Village greens of the north
- Binomial
- Nivosus ludibundus
- Diet
- Fresh snow, hot cocoa steam, carrots
- Temperament
- Cheerful, dancing, fond of doorsteps