Kara Sepulveda Photo
Though it remained hard to see over the mounds of snow lining my street, speculation about the about the big green creature sprawled across my Westville lawn was not in short supply. Is it a dragon, a dinosaur? How was it painted?
A small boy with his sister and mother gave a thumbs up as he authoritatively asserted, “It’s a Stegosaurus.” Period.
Another passerby said she was happy to see that “it’s a vegetarian” after spying sprigs of pachysandra dangling from the creature’s mouth.
The day after a near-record snow fall, a newspaper photographer had knocked on our door to ask a few questions. “What inspired your father to make this?” he asked my son. I wasn’t home to answer the question myself, but did give it some thought as I drove home from work later that day.
The short answer was “Snow Day!” a phrase that usually thrills not only students, but their teachers (my day job). With the frequency of storms of-late, the joys of unscheduled days off had begun to wear thin and the repetitive cycle of shoveling — an arduous exercise in tedium and endurance — seemed no bargain in the trade.
And this was no ordinary snowfall.
The fast moving nor’easter had dumped nearly two feet of snow during the overnight, on top of what skiers like to refer to as a “good base” — an accumulation from previous snow events.
Mercifully, the storm moved out early in the day, yielding to sunshine and commiserating neighbors armed with shovels and snow blowers, all doing their best to carve out a labyrinth of walkways, or liberating their cars from cages of snow left in the wake of dutiful city plows.
The city was not the only entity looking for places to pile the snow. Residents had little choice but to pile it high. For me, displacing the snow represented not only a challenge, but an opportunity to get in on the snow-day magic reminiscent of another era when “PlayStation” was not a mind-numbing video game, but a snow fort that one constructed in preparation for the mother of all snowball fights.
The rising mound of snow as I began to dig out suggested the form that would soon follow: stalactite-sized icicles damming over my home’s gutters would surely come in handy. In a few hours I had created a large, rough-hewn, if ambiguous figure, an amalgam of prehistoric features whose definition would be left to the beholder.
With so much snow piled everywhere, my snow creature was camouflaged and hard to see. The only solution was to add a little color. Florescent tempera paints were water-thinned and placed in a clean Windex spray bottle. As dusk fell, the applied color glowed. Painted icicles looked like light sabers radiating from within. My daughter Kara, a photography student at Wilbur Cross High School, went about the task of documenting the creation, taking intermittent breaks to help unclog my makeshift sprayer.
For the next few mornings, I greeted neighbors and passersby as I tended my winter “garden,” refreshing colors or patching the form after the previous day’s melt. Occasionally a car would stop, its occupants jumping out to light up their phone cameras. Neighbors passing by were not short of praise, and my Facebook friends were equally generous in their compliments.
But it was a phone call from my former Alderwoman, Nancy Ahern, thanking me for building the neighborhood amusement that really struck a chord. The smiles on the kids’ faces had me considering what I might make next, should we be “blessed” with another winter blast.