Published January 7, 1988

I was pondering the problem of surviving another winter when yet another complication arose. 

How is history going to judge my futile efforts? Five hundred years from now, what are people going to think of all my trials and tribulations? How am I doing in the big scheme of things? 

It wasn’t enough, suddenly, to worry about the car not starting when the temperature outside was dipping to 10 below zero. The fact that most activity—social, physical, mental and financial—was screeching to a halt, now seemed inconsequential. Wondering whether I would wake up dead between now and April became a shallow thing to ponder about. The question that was now foremost in my mind was “What are the schoolchildren of the twenty-fifth century going to think when they read about me in their class on Ancient History? I can envision the little second-graders of that future generation chuckling at old photos of twentieth-century man shoveling snow from his sidewalks. 

“What a preposterous waste of time and effort!” the little know-it-alls will exclaim. The idea of hurling this cold, heavy, white stuff from pile to pile will seen hilariously inept to them. When they learn about the two-ton tucks with the giant shovels attached to the fronts of them that push the snow from the street, back onto the newly-cleared walk, they will be even more amazed.

I can’t imagine how they will respond when they find out about things like thermal underwear, ear muffs, electric socks, studded snow tires, wind-chill factors, frostbite, frozen water pipes, wood stoves, snowmobile boots and rock salt. The teachers of the twenty-fifth century will probably have a difficult time maintaining any semblance of discipline with all the students rolling around the floor in uncontrollable fits of laughter.

In an effort to maintain a smidgen of dignity for myself and my fellow sufferers of twentieth-century winters, I thought I would go out and build a snowman in the front yard. My snowman would be waving one fist defiantly at the elements that produced it, and giving a message to my descendants who find its photograph sometime in the distant future. We couldn’t make this terrible thing go away, so it just had to learn to live with us.