I brought over a lawn chair for my visiting snowman to relax on, and thanks to Google voice recognition translator, I was able to decode most of what the snowman was trying to say. A little snow cat had jumped up on his lap, and helped put him at ease.

“You and I are very different”, he said. “I’ve come a long way and [and here he either said he was staying with his Aunt Attica or he had come from Antarctica – it didn’t help that he talked extremely slow and soft and mumbled half the time]… I’m shivering not because I’m cold, but because I am afraid.” When I nodded sympathetically, he continued, “I shiver when I feel warmth, because I know I’ll start to melt. Melting is not painful, just one never knows when they will appear again, and in what form. My girlfriend from last year might have reappeared this winter as this little cat here – one never knows.”

He went on, “I feel fortunate that I’ve come back in a similar shape as last year, and that I’ve arrived in a yard where people respect me, and don’t just wrap a silly striped scarf around my neck and forget about me.” [here I cringed, because in the past I’ve been guilty of same.]

As this little conversation took several hours to complete, and the sun was starting to take it’s toll on him – I might have thought that it was my imagination if I hadn’t had my Google translator handy – we both called it a day.

“But we both like cats,” he managed to say as I was walking away…

 

I saw him apparently looking up to my bedroom window.

What could he possibly want? I set him up with a nice snow woman last year and they seemed made for each other (see last year’s post “This Really Happened”). Where is she now? What happened?

 

He is so obviously sensitive to the cold. Look at him, shivering out there alone. Perhaps it’s an existential, rather than physical, cold he suffers from. At any rate, I think I’ll go out there and throw a coat over him and see if I can communicate with him.

Hmmm. He wouldn’t look at me or talk to me or even acknowledge my existence. He just keeps staring at the sky. Bird watching? Or maybe he has an eye on that windvane on my house.

We’ll see what tomorrow may bring. In the meantime, I’ll practice up on my snow dialect and learn the whispers and subtle tinklings that characterize his language, and maybe we can at least exchange basic pleasantries while he is around… (to be continued).