A Record-Breaking Winter

“Did you see this week’s weather report, Don?”

Don kept his head down as he wiped off the bar, knowing only one person in town would sound that chipper at the promise of freezing temperatures. He sighed and silently cursed winter for coming earlier every year.

“I sure did, Ronnie.”

Don looked up as Ronnie took his place atop a barstool with a schoolboy grin stretched across his chapped lips. Don placed Ronnie’s beer down in front of him and looked at the door, wishing for another patron to walk in and become the new target of Ronnie’s rantings. Alas, Don knew his wish was futile. After managing Slim’s for more than two decades, he knew the drinking schedule of everyone in town and hadn’t served a stranger in seven months. The last out-of-towner who came in for a drink while he waited for his tow truck left after just a few sips of his whiskey sour. He probably got tired of everyone staring at him like he had three head and tentacles. Madison, Iowa didn’t get many visitors, and the locals treated their routines like they were law. Don knew he wouldn’t see another customer until Charlie came in at 5:15. That meant 20 uninterrupted minutes with Ronnie.

“We’ve got snowfall coming this week, Don.” Ronnie squirmed on his stool. Don couldn’t believe that Ronnie still got this excited, even after 11 years of doing this shit.

“It might just be a dusting, Ronnie. I wouldn’t get your hopes up.”

Ronnie dismissed him with the wave of his hand. The pessimism of this town rolled off him like spitballs off a battleship. Every winter, all Ronnie heard was that his hopes were too high. Some people delivered this message slowly while resting a hand on his shoulder, and others were stern or more dismissive. Everyone tried to find the right delivery to get through to him, but Ronnie remained undeterred. To his neighbors, Ronnie’s fierce sense of hope and positivity after so much failure made about as much sense as trying to nail Jell-o to a wall.

“A dusting is still something. But I know this will be a snowstorm. I’ve got my coolers and freezer cleaned out. I even emailed that reporter, letting him know to get ready. This is going to be the year.”

“Ronnie, look man. I’m real inspired by your optimism. We all are. But it’s been 11 years that you’ve been trying to break the record for the tallest snowman in the United States. Don’t you think it’s time to focus on something else?”

“Absolutely not!” Ronnie insisted. “Think of the publicity our town will get from breaking the record. Slim’s could actually turn a profit. Millie’s bakery could afford to keep its doors open. And just picture the joy it would bring people. I mean, who could be sad looking at a 102-foot snowman?”

Don didn’t know why he even tried. He learned long ago that the best way to deal with Ronnie was apathy and agreeableness. It was no use arguing sense to a senseless man.

“I guess you’re right. Well good luck this year, buddy. Hope it works out.”

--

The community wasn’t always so harsh on Ronnie and his dreams. They thought he was a little peculiar, but they always humored his antics. He was a third-generation Madison, Iowan, sprouting up here alongside the cornstalks on his family farm. From the time he could talk, it was clear that his imagination stretched far beyond the town limits. He shrugged off the routine or conventions people tried to set on him, opting instead for adventure and chaos. When he was 6, he set up a bike race around town, weaving medals out of corn husks for the top finishers. At 10, he organized the town’s first 4th of July parade, going door-to-door to sign people up to build floats. To his credit, Madison just held its 40th annual parade. Ronnie was invested in creating unexpected moments of joy for others, and he took immense pride in making his town a better place.

Everyone expected him to move to bigger and better places when he turned 18, but he stayed. He never once considered leaving the community who supported and embraced his quirks. As he aged, he took over the farm from his father, married, and had a daughter. Despite his climbing age and responsibilities, he held tight to his youthful exuberance.

--

11 years ago, he got his biggest idea yet after reading a story about a small town in Illinois that set the record for the largest windchime in the country. This windchime brought new life to their struggling town with the economic boom from the new tourists. All his life, Ronnie watched helplessly as his neighbors shuttered their business and drove long commutes to jobs in bigger cities. It never seemed fair that people had to leave Madison to make money. Now, he’d found a way to bring the money to Madison.

He started brainstorming, looking up records for the biggest cookie and widest rubberband ball. When his daughter asked him to make a snowman that winter, Ronnie knew the winning idea. After looking up the current record, he spread word around town – they were going to build the tallest snowman in the United States.

His infectious energy and the promise of out-of-towners’ money caught like wildfire. Everyone shoveled snow from their driveways into plastic bins to store in Ronnie’s shed that he’d converted to a walk-in freezer. Neighbors brought oversized branches for the arms and created hand drawn plans to aid in the logistics of building the 102-foot snowman. The women of the local nursing home knitted a 10-foot scarf. Ronnie called around to local journalists and invited them to watch the build and report the broken record.

Nearly every member of the town, skeptics and believers alike, rose before the sun on January 5th and journeyed to Ronnie’s farm to start the build. Even one journalist, an avid snowman builder in his childhood, joined the crowd. The group split into teams – base builders, ladder climbers, forklift drivers, and hot cocoa makers. For hours, the town rolled, shaped and grew the snowman. Their arms ached and their beanies and parkas filled with sweat, but optimism held strong.

It wasn’t until they were down to their last few bins of snow that the dream started to slip away. When the snow ran out and they still had 11 feet to go, everyone looked to their fearless leader for ideas. Ronnie was always ready with something up his sleeve, and surely, he’d planned for this. For once, he had nothing. The exhausted, expectant eyes on him paralyzed his imagination and his vocal cords. After a few minutes of silence, the journalist got in his car and the ladies from the nursing home returned to their bus to head home.

That night, as the giant, misshapen failure melted outside their window, Ronnie’s wife assured him that this was still a success. Getting the town to unite and focus on this goal brought magic and excitement to a long, harsh winter. But Ronnie didn’t need to hear it. He wasn’t crushed, he told his wife, he was determined.

--

Next winter, he restarted his campaign. The enthusiasm in the town had waned, but people still brought him snow when they remembered. Unfortunately, that winter was unseasonably warm, and Madison barely got an inch of snow. The next eight years featured a string of mishaps and failures – the ice storm on build day in 2017, the forklift disaster in 2019, the broken freezer in 2021, and Ronnie’s wife leaving him the winter of 2023. No matter the challenges, Ronnie was there every winter, desperate to reignite the excitement of the first year.

After the tenth failure, his friends and daughter pleaded with him to stop. They couldn’t stand to hear about the snowman and the good it could do for their town. Madison was still standing without a record-breaking snowman, they said. It was time for him to let it go.

Ronnie shut down their pleas, insisting he would finish what he started. He paid no mind to the lack of eye contact he received in the winter. What his neighbors called delusion, he labeled perseverance. He couldn’t understand why people gave up so easily after the first year. Didn’t they want to put Madison on the map? Didn’t they want to be in the record books? Didn’t they want to matter?

So, off he went, at the first snowfall of the eleventh winter, shoveling his snow into the plastic bins. He moved around his neighborhood, shoveling their sidewalks to build his collection. His neighbors stayed inside, watching as he cleared their snow without asking for payment. A blustery December storm brought 10 inches of snow. January was brutal, bringing another 12 inches. The temperature never rose above 30 degrees and Ronnie never stopped shoveling.

Ronnie’s hands were blistered and his forearms had ached since November, but he could feel it. This was the year. To his delight, two days before he planned to build, a final storm blew through.

--

Mrs. Meyer didn’t know that anyone was in her driveway until she heard a scream. The coffee cup slipped from her hand and crashed to the floor when the wail erupted. She ran to her window and saw Ronnie, flat on his back. Mrs. Meyer yelled for her husband to call 911 before running outside.

“Ronnie! What are you doing here? What happened?” She shouted as she made her way down her driveway.

“I slipped. It’s..my back,” he gasped. The pain stole his breath, and he struggled to sputter out a reply.

“John’s calling 911. Help is coming, honey.” She knelt beside him and reached for his hand, instructing him to squeeze it as hard as he needed.

He mustered a feeble squeeze as a sign of thanks.

“It’s so snowy…and I thought…your driveway could use a shoveling.” he said.

“Oh dear, are you still trying to break that record? The sidewalks are completely iced over and it’s dangerous to be outside. Don’t you think it’s time, Ronnie? Time to move on to another dream?”

Mrs. Meyer met Ronnie just three days after he was born and delighted in watching all the directions he'd grown over the years. But seeing him as he was now, a middle-aged man splayed out on her driveway with pain contorting his face, broke her heart.

“Why are you still doing all this honey?” she asked, her tone softer now.

“I just…wanted to do something good. The people here deserve to be known. I thought maybe this would make us important.”

There on the driveway, with a pounding head and a spasming back, the reality of his foolishness the past eleven years finally set in. His relationships, his reputation, his marriage, and now his body. Ronnie sacrificed all that for a pointless pipe dream. He didn’t know if his pride, or his back, would ever recover.

The ambulance barreled up to Mrs. Meyer’s house and took Ronnie to the hospital. The shrill siren summoned all of Madison to their porches, where they looked on with furrowed brows and tried to guess the identity of the unlucky passenger.

--

The doctor diagnosed Ronnie with a herniated disc, cracked rib, and a concussion, which meant an overnight stay. With the realization of just how much torment he’d caused his neighbors, Ronnie would be fine to stay here forever. The feelings that sprouted on Mrs. Meyer’s driveway now bloomed into a full, unrelenting shame, and this unfamiliar emotion sat like an anchor on his chest. His actions over the last eleven years, playing on a relentless loop in his mind, suddenly took on a different meaning. What he once saw as scrappy resilience looked now like alarming delusion. He wasn’t a free-spirited dreamer. He was just the town lunatic who’d lost his mind, marriage, and mobility.

His daughter came to his bedside, and he offered her a quiet apology. He promised to do his best to be a father that she wasn’t embarrassed to claim.

“I’ve never been embarrassed to have you as a dad,” she replied. “I like that when you dream, you go for the moon. I just need you to come down to Earth, back down to me, every once in a while.”

--

The next morning, Ronnie hobbled into the passenger seat of his daughter’s car. He needed to apologize to his neighbors for the trouble he’d caused, but he didn’t have the guts quite yet. He planned to hibernate in his house until March, and hoped he would find the courage then. As his daughter drove, he closed his eyes and drifted to sleep.

“Dad, wake up,” his daughter said a few minutes later, shaking Ronnie awake.

Robbie stirred and rubbed his eyes. “What’s wrong?” he asked.

“Look,” she pointed out the passenger side window.

Mr. & Mrs. Cormack, the first house on Madison’s main road, smiled and waved to him from their front yard. Next to them stood a snowman, about 4-feet tall with his own smile formed of coal. Robbie cautiously waved, wondering if concussions caused hallucinations.

At the next house, Mrs. Roth, next to a snowman of her own, blew Robbie a kiss. Robbie sat up straighter, looked at the road ahead, and gasped. At every house on the street, stood a waving neighbor and a snowman. There were snowmen of all varieties – short and stout, long and skinny, some with glasses, baseball caps, or earrings. He stared agog, trying to make sense of this beautifully strange greeting committee.

“What’s going on?” he asked his daughter.

“They did this for you, dad. They wanted to build the record-breaking snowman while you were in the hospital but realized that they couldn’t do it without your leadership. Hopefully a town full of regular-sized snowmen will be good enough to cheer you up.”

“I can’t believe it,” he said. “Why would they do all this for me? I’ve been nothing but a nuisance for over a decade.”

“They felt bad for shutting you down for so many years. Everyone knows you meant well and became so obsessed because of your love for Madison. They wanted you to know that Madison loves you too.”

They inched through town, passing every neighbor and their snowman creation. By the time they pulled into their driveway, Ronnie’s wheels were turning. He needed to plan something grand as a show of gratitude. He knew now the 102-foot snowman was outlandish, but his heart was in the right place all those years ago. Madison still deserved to be known and maybe there was some other way he could make that happen.

Ronnie turned his daughter, coy smile spreading across his face, and asked, “What do you think the record is for most snowmen built in one town?”