fat-bottomed girl

fat-bottomed girl
Originally uploaded by bluedevi

I wasn't intending to make a snowman. Snowperson. I just sort of found myself doing it. I got off work early - none of my afternoon students showed up. (The rest were having a snowball fight in the little patch of park next to the canal.) So I got off the bus a few stops early, went through a hedge and up the hill to the golf course, where there were expanses so blank and white they confused my eyes, and that mixture of weird breath-caught hush nearby and distant shrieks of delight from sledding kids, which I do realise has already been described by everybody on LJ but is still wonderful first-hand.

Earlier today I arrived at the cafe on Gloucester Green where I have my lunch to find a massive snowman maybe seven feet tall, counting the traffic cone on his head, and several middle-aged men in hi-viz jackets lounging in the chairs in front of the cafe, laughing and taking pictures. I stopped and stared and asked them "who made that?" and they said, proudly, "We did!" He was your classic snowman, three big snowballs in a stack and twig arms, pennies for buttons down his front. There was another one in the courtyard of the flats this morning, with an umbrella and a bikini and bits of dead grass stuck to its head in an approximation of sun-bleached surfer hair.

So I wasn't planning to make a snowman, and then I was just going to make a standard three-snowballs one. Then I stood back and hmmmed at the hip-waist ratio and spent the next half hour or so feverishly sculpting, soaking my gloves through, remembering The Snowman cartoon from my childhood and wondering why there are so few snow-women. Thinking of a conversation with parallelgirl after the Antony Gormley exhibition in London a couple of years ago, about how a male statue can be seen as just generic-human, while female ones are assumed to be about specific things - femininity or sexuality. Then I came home to find she'd been out building snowmen too, and had had almost the same thought process while watching a kid anxiously removing accidental breasts from a snowman, because heaven forbid it'd look like a snowwoman!

I was sorry to part with the snowwoman. She looks sort of calm and stable to me. But by then my boots were leaking.



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