Dear Snow Hit Man,

Do you have to?

I figured all the death would become boring after a while. I thought that you’d need to wash away the white of the snow-blood you’ve bathed in eventually. But every day, I walk to Porter Park with my wife, and every day, there are more and more piles of snow.

We built a snowman once. It was our first snowman. I grew up where it never snowed, so it was also the first snowman I had ever built. We built him next to one of his brethren. We found two sticks and some pinecones for eyes and a mouth. I even gave him a crown. He was the Snowman King. And you slaughtered him.

When we returned the next day, he was nowhere to be seen. Except there was his head, and there were his legs. But regicide wasn’t enough. You butchered the snow-peasant who watched his birth, too.

I’ve watched them rise and fall one by one. Every day, there was a new snowman, and every day, there were new graves. You turned the park into a cemetery, you monster.

A family built their snowman right outside the window behind their apartment, and you toppled him, too! Now, when I walk past, his round mass lies fallen on the ground.

No one else has such an appetite for destruction. Everyone else is happy to create life, but all you can do is end it. Think of what might have been! We could have had a forest, a village of snowmen.

I gave you the benefit of the doubt. I thought that maybe, just maybe, it wasn’t malicious. Maybe it was a dog, but no. I made another of my snow children. I taught him to play tennis and stood him in the tennis courts by the swing set. Alas, his life was brief. I discovered him the next day toppled, and his sister, whom my wife built, lay assassinated beside him.

How could you! What cruel hunter has the time to knock down snowmen before they live a mere 24 hours?

I cannot pretend to understand the thirst you so readily slake. All I can see is the peaceful kingdom that might have been. Eventually, I decided that it was better that they were never born than to be so determinedly ended. And others agreed. They stopped making snowmen and started making snow-bales so large they had to be removed. Once, huge rolls of snow dominated the park like boulders launched from a trebuchet. Now, the devastated ruins of a glacial paradise are all that remains.

With icy hands and frozen tears,

Moses
Snow-mourner