Chilly Read (concluded)

               The Igloo: Part IV

After that, the temperature warmed up again. The igloo survived a couple days of 60 and 70° weather. While the snow on the ground melted and turned to mud, it stood unflinchingly in the sunshine. 

But even the nearly one-foot-thick walls didn’t last forever. Each trek to the end of the street found the igloo in a little less of its former glory. Solid ice turned to pockmarked slush. One day, while we were there, the roof fell in. A bright blue sky shone in through the gaping hole. All too soon, the walls crumbled. What had taken us four days to build collapsed, melted, and disappeared. But not without a trace.

The day after it melted, I walked down the now dry street, and looked for what was left. There was no more snow, but where our white fortress used to stand, an imprint of it was pressed into the carpet of leaves. Gallons of frozen water had stamped its shape into the ground. It was like looking at roofless pillars on the cracked stone floor of a ruined castle and picturing where the entrance and the walls of the throne room used to be.

Like when visiting the remnants of a once stately old building, there was a feeling of melancholy. In that in-between time of no longer the glittering white beauty of winter but not yet the vivid greens and rainbow palette of spring, of a sea of snow crystals replaced by muddy leaves and wilted grass, of roads scattered with sand, not blanketed with snow, of the dwindling warmth and glow of the wood stove and the dissipating wood smoke from the chimney, I was sad. It is always sad to see winter go. But at the same time, I say that it is better to have snowed and melted than never to have snowed at all.