Little People

I own a fairly sizable lot. While it’s not an acreage, it is certainly larger than the lots of a lot of people I know. My back yard is 800’ X 100’ and is fenced in on all sides by a tall wooden fence. After years of landscaping it now has a pond, many trees, and an aviary, but at the time this happened it only had a sparse population of trees and bushes and a shack. I have always lived alone.

One December morning, on a Sunday, I woke up to find that the weatherman was right. Snow covered my backyard. After drinking my coffee, I decided to go outside to take some pictures of the snow. First I snapped a few photos of my house from the front, then went to the back yard. While walking to the end of the yard I noticed something…peculiar.

In the middle of the yard, under a willow tree, there stood six small objects. On closer inspection I found that they resembled those little mini-snowmen that little children make, with one large snowball forming the body and another smaller one forming the head. They were all arranged in a ring. Each had two pebbles in the head for eyes.

I was confused. I wondered if maybe a kid from the neighborhood had wandered into my yard and made these. But the strangest thing was that there was no set of footprints in the snow leading to or from this ring of snow-people.

It was 1989 when these figures first showed up in my back yard. I still get them every winter.