It’s safe to say that the Northeast got a little bit of snow this winter. Blizzard after blizzard after blizzard after blizzard — hold up, I’m almost done — after blizzard after blizzard… it was enough to shut down the city of Boston for a month and seriously put a damper on everybody’s plans.
And, if my neighborhood was of any indication, it also put a damper on the plow guys’ mood. After the first blizzard, two of my neighbor’s mailboxes were knocked clean off their posts. After the second? Mine joined the list of the (literally) fallen.
There really wasn’t much that could be done. By then, the snow banks were easily three feet high and installing a new mailbox would have been downright impossible (or, y’know, really, really tricky). I propped the mailbox on top of the snowbank and wondered what I was going to do about this situation. Thankfully, Mother Nature supplied an answer by giving us more of what we already had: snow.
After the third blizzard, snow banks were practically shoulder height (and, given how tall I am, that’s a lot of height) — enough that it covered our broken, propped-up mailbox. And I had seen enough Buzzfeed articles about all the fun ways you could make a snowman. I knew exactly what I needed to do next.
I grabbed some charcoal, a baby carrot, some twigs and — just like Anna and Elsa — I built me a snowman.
No, not just any snowman: snowMAILBOXman.
Carved out of an absurdly tall snowbank, looking like he was in distress or shouting “GOOOOOOAL!”, Snowmailboxman kept our broken mailbox in place — while providing amusement to our friendly neighborhood postal carriers (and the people on Facebook, because, seriously, how can you NOT do something like this, and not then immediately show it off on social media?).
Within the week, we were hit with yet.another.blizzard.
Not one to be deterred, I came back out, fished out the charcoal and the carrot, and Snowmailboxman was back in action, only looking a little more flat-chested and a lot more like he was running away from something (perhaps the snowblower?)
And — for those who had been paying attention to the weather up around these parts — you know exactly what happened next: yet another blizzard. And, while the world (and by “the world”, I mean “the northeast” because the rest of the globe is irrelevant for this story) was put on hold yet again, Snowmailboxman had yet another opportunity to rise from the ashes — er, snow. This time, with an extra half foot of snow on his head — perfect for, say, a mohawk — Snowmailboxman turned into PUNK ROCK Snowmailboxman.
Now he wasn’t in distress or shouting “GOOOAL!” He was flipping off the world, shouting, “ANARCHY IN THE NE!”
Which, really, given that Boston essentially no longer had a public transit system, people were crashing their cars left and right, and cities were genuinely running out of places to put the #$%&ing snow, there was a lot of anarchy going on in the New England.
Okay, ready for something new and different? A week later, we got ANOTHER blizzard. I went out to reconstruct my Punk Rock Snowmailboxman, only to find his mohawk crumbling under my hands. While I was frustrated that I couldn’t salvage my little frozen anarchist, I noticed that his mohawk was starting to take a shape of a hat. A very specific type of hat, worn by a gigantic marshmallow-y beast that likes terrorizing New York and can only be destroyed when you cross the streams…
Armed with an old spray bottle, some leftover Easter dye tabs, and the incredible irony of using a springtime activity on a snowman, I created Stay Puft Marshmallow Snowmailboxman. As the snowbanks got higher, his name got longer.
Mother Nature was not done yet. The Northeast received one more major blizzard. It was then that I learned you don’t need the Ghostbusters to stop Stay Puft Marshmallow Snowmailboxman — you just need another couple feet of snow. But that worked out fine for me, because, with that extra snow, those charcoal eyes started to look a bit like charcoal nostrils…
I was going more for a ferocious dragon, guarding over the place (and our mail) with steel resolve. Instead, I got more of a cross between Falkor and a husky puppy. Even when I added the scaly back, he was not ferocious so much as he was adorable.
You can almost hear the puppy-like, “roar!”
But that was okay, because:
1) Adorable dragons can still be really good watchmen.
2) Who DIDN’T want a luck dragon growing up? I mean, honestly.
So now, after six or seven blizzards, I had a 5-foot-high frozen luck dragon guarding my house. Meanwhile, in Alaska, the Iditarod was rerouted due to a lack of snow. Because God has a sense of humor and the Platypus is not the only example of this.
Sadly, all good things must come to an end. Eventually the snow slowly started melting. While I was happy to actually see ground again, the warm weather didn’t exactly bode well for Husky-Falkor Snowmailboxman (formerly of Stay Puft and Punk Rock fame). One afternoon I came out to see quite possibly the most depressing mailbox-related thing:
(Who needs the Swamp of Sorrows when you’ve got the inevitable change in weather patterns? I’m just gonna sink into the mud now…)
It didn’t take long before Snowmailboxman man went the way of all snowmen — with the exception of Olaf, of course. The snow melted until any hint of a snowman was gone. I wasn’t sure which was sadder: the loss of Snowmailboxman, or the loss of what was holding up our mailbox.
Three bungee cords is a sad replacement for the multiple reincarnations that was Snowmailboxman. And I can almost guarantee you that it’s less amusing for the postal carriers.
I found a piece of charcoal by the edge of my driveway — perhaps a coat button, or an eye, or a dragon nostril. All that remains of the once legendary Snowmailboxman.
That (Not This) Abby Rose 