The Charm Bracelet(59)

Arden gathered a tiny ball of snow, which disintegrated in her hands.

Lolly again smiled at her daughter, and trudged through the snow. She kissed her daughter’s stocking-capped head. An inch of newly fallen snow toppled off the top of Arden’s head as if her mother had just knocked it off with a broom.

“Follow my lead,” Lolly said, turning in a wide circle to gather the base for the snowman, pushing snow into a large mound.

Mother and daughter worked silently in tandem as the snow hissed around them, their grunts and pats echoing in the quiet, white world. When they were finished, a nearly four-foot round, plump sentinel stood quietly on the hill as if to protect their little log cabin and the frozen lake below.

“Is it time for hot chocolate?” Arden asked. “I’m getting cold and wet.”

“Oh, we’re not done yet, my dear,” Lolly said. “We still have to give her a little personality to bring her to life, just like Frosty. Wait here!”

Her? Arden thought.

Lolly trudged through the snow, now hip deep on her, leaving a meandering trail behind her. She returned a minute later carrying a plastic bag.

“First things first,” Lolly laughed, setting the bag atop the snow and plucking out a feather boa. “To keep our snow woman warm and stylish.”

“Frosty is a boy, Mom!” Arden protested. “He can’t wear that!”

“Ours is a snow woman! And snow women can be even more magical, my dear,” Lolly said. “She just needs a piece of us—our history—a little extra dimension to make her shine in this world.”

Lolly pulled out a pair of large blue buttons and stuck them on the snow woman’s face followed by a pair of fake eyelashes as big as butterflies. Next came a carrot for a nose and smaller red buttons for lips. Pink buttons trailed down the snow woman’s front.

“Over there,” Lolly said to Arden, motioning to a pine tree. “Get us a couple of those fallen branches.”

When Arden returned, Lolly attached them as arms, placing an old purse in her piney hands.

“And now? The finishing touch!” Lolly said, yanking out a straw hat—drenched in spring flowers—and placing it on the snow woman’s head with a flourish. “Voilà!”

Lolly and Arden took a step back to admire their work.

“What do you see when you look at our snow woman?” Lolly asked.

Arden’s face still registered confusion.

“I thought snowmen were men,” Arden asked. “That they couldn’t be women.”

Lolly let out a deep sigh that lingered, frozen, in front of her face. She grabbed her daughter’s hand. “You can create and be anything in this world that you want to be,” she said, shaking her mitten, her bracelet jangling in the silence. “Your imagination should be limitless.”

Lolly continued. “Didn’t you know that people are just like snowflakes? No two are alike.”

“Really?” Arden asked.

Lolly lifted her face to the sky and let the snowflakes gather on her eyelashes. When she blinked, they caught in the wind and went flying.

“You bet,” Lolly said. “As snowflakes fall from the sky, they each take a different path to reach the earth. They float and flicker through clouds and cold, taking shape in a unique way, just like us. Every snowflake takes a different journey to the ground that makes it unique. Sometimes it’s hard for them to make it all the way here to us, but they do, still holding on to all those wonderful dimensions that make them different from every other snowflake in the world.”

Arden held out her hand and waited for a snowflake to land in her palm. “You mean this one is different from every other one out here?”

Lolly stopped and stooped, her knees slowly sinking in the snow until she was at eye level with her young daughter. “Yes! Isn’t that amazing? But what we try to do is to fit in and conform, so we’re like everyone else. We lose all of our unique angles…”

Lolly grabbed her daughter’s hand and held it in the air, snowflakes gathering in Arden’s mitten. “… that make us special, just like these snowflakes. It’s up to us to remember how multifaceted we are and to celebrate all those odd little angles we have which make us who we are.”

Arden smiled and nodded.

“What a dumb snowman!”

The words cracked through the air, breaking the frozen silence and making nearby cardinals take flight. Lolly stood and turned, her arms protectively in front of Arden.

Two boys were standing a few feet away, one dragging a sled and the other a toboggan.

“You boys know better than that,” Lolly said, turning. “Watch your tone.”

Arden remained behind her mother. That’s when the wind-burned faces of these two boys registered in Lolly’s mind: Arden had pointed them out to her once after she got off the bus, saying how they always teased her at school.

“Sorry,” one said without any remorse. “Let’s go, Ted.”

The two boys trudged off into the snow, until they disappeared into the fog.

Arden was still standing behind her mother, when Lolly suddenly dropped like a dead weight onto the ground.

“Snow angels!” she yelled, trying to distract her daughter’s mind from the boys. “Let’s see yours!”

Arden fell into the snow with a soft whoosh, and began sliding her arms and legs through the snow, giggling as the powder flew into the air.