Christmas Spirit

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Port remembered each frozen structure - one year the kids built a solid wall of ice; another year a big snowstorm dumped enough flakes to build three connecting walls (and a porthole window). Port also remembered the time he and the other boys were in a snowfort war, pitching snowballs and iceballs and slushballs back and forth among each other - and the one day when Sister Kateri saw the frozen architecture in the back garden, and summoned Port to her office. Port thought he would receive a reprimand for building something so secular on church property, but Sister Kateri caught him off-guard. "You have built a very nice snow fort," Sister Kateri said, "but where will the snow warriors go for Mass? Do they not deserve their own house of worship?"

Port agreed with her, but said that he didn’t know how to build a chapel out of snow - all he knew were snow forts and the occasional snowman A few weeks later, Sister Kateri signed some books out from the public library - all about architects and construction and the biographies of Frank Lloyd Wright and I.M. Pei. And Port read every one of them - and learned something new.

"I wonder if there’s enough snow in this yard to build a real snow fort," Port said to himself.

"A snow fort?"

"Yeah. We’ve got the snow - let’s build a fort."

"But what about the snowman?" the kid asked.

"Don’t worry," said Port. "We’ll build him later - he has to guard the fort - and we’ll need to build a church nearby, so he can go to worship on Sunday."

It was 3:00 in the afternoon when Port and the boy finished their snow fort. They had used almost all the snow that once covered the driveway, along with some from the front lawn. Port gathered some loose branches from a fallen tree in the back yard, and placed them on top of the three-walled snow fort as an ersatz roof.

When it came time to build the snowman, Port taught the boy how to pack round snowballs together, and to roll the packed snowballs on the ground until the got bigger and bigger. Between the two of them, they rolled three small snowballs into three large iceballs - one for the snowman’s waist, one for his middle, and one for the head. For decorations, Port looked in the trunk of his Volkswagen and found a few leftover items - some soda twist-off caps for the snowman’s eyes and mouth; a pair of old worn-out canvas sneakers for the snowman’s feet; and a baseball cap for the snowman’s head.

"Well, that’s it," said Port. "You have a snow fort, a snowman to guard it - and your driveway’s nice and clean."

"Gee thanks, mister. What do we do now?"

Port looked at his watch. "I don’t know about you, kid - but I’ve got to get to the library before it closes. I go to college at Iverhill State, and I’ve got a project due soon that still needs some work. So I’ll see you later, kid. Thanks for the fun."

With that, Port turned away from the child and walked back toward the Volkswagen. As he reached for his keys to unlock the door, he suddenly felt a stinging punch in his neck.

He turned around, and saw the boy, twenty feet away from him, with a snowball in one mitten and tiny ice crystals dangling from his other mitten. "Mister, was that the right size for a throwin’ snowball?"

As the ice melted down his neck and under his coat, Port quickly forgot all about the midyear thesis, about the library, about Christmas Eve. "That’s not a throwing snowball, kid," he said, reaching for a mound of snow from the roof of his car. "This is!!"

With that, he purposely threw the snowball ten feet over the kid’s head, who ran for the safety of the snow fort. For the next hour Port and the boy tossed snowballs back and forth like two generals with an endless supply of frozen ammunition.

By 4:30, Port was tired. Instead of time spent on his thesis, he had wasted an entire day playing with some stranger’s kid in the snow. The library was closed, and all Port could do was drive back up to the campus and catch a nap before Midnight Mass. He said goodbye to the child, telling him to take care of the fort and guard it against the incoming marauders from Red Pine Road.

As he got back into the car and drove back to the college, Port realized he hadn’t even asked the boy for a name. But he noticed another car was pulling into the freshly-shoveled driveway, and it was probably for the best that the boy’s mother didn’t see a stranger parked in front of the house.

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