Of course, there's a story here...

 

So

Actually, this is snow toilet #2.

The first was built when my kids were high school age. I'd come home one afternoon when the snow was perfect and they all wanted me to make a snow sculpture. Years before I had made huge rabbits or squirrels out of snow, big enough that I had to get a stepladder to finish the top. If we were lucky we'd get a hard freeze the next day and the sculptures would last for days or even a couple weeks.

Snowmen, the ones with the three balls stacked up, were always a bit ho-hum, except the one time when I was determined to make a huge one. I pushed the first ball around until it was about 4 feet in diameter. Then the second was so heavy I couldn't get it up onto the first one. To hell with it.

My father sometimes got the bug to play in the snow and he made things like rabbits or sheep. Usually they were lying down so he didn't have to deal with legs. Once, since he was into trains, he even created a steam engine. He never had to use a ladder, though.

So then I came home that day when the snow was right and the kids said it was time to build a sculpture again. Forget it, I said.. It was near the end of the day, I was tired, and when the snow's right you have to work hard and fast. They kept after me, though.

"All right, what'll it be?"

"A big toilet," Tonja said. "We ought to make a big toilet."

So I found my buckskin mittens, grabbed a couple shovels, and we all went to work. At least I had help building the pile. We had it nearly shaped when it all collapsed. Some of the neophytes didn't understand about packing the snow on the bottom. By now the sun was about to go behind the hill and the snow would soon lose some of it's workability. In the end, though, with all of us working on it, we finished just as it was getting dark. The final touch was to shove the rake handle into a snow to stand beside the toilet.

We were on a busy corner in Brattleboro and a lot of people saw the toilet.Several people stopped to take a picture of it. One woman laughed as she got out of her car and said she thought it could be improved witht a brown stain or two. 

When we were living in England I'd told some of the neighbors about the Brattleboro toilet. We hadn't seen a lot of snow over there. They used to have proper winters but the last 30 years or so significant snow has been so rare that some of the younger people don't even know about snow tires. A little snow and everything shuts down, much like Georgia or North Carolina.

But there was snow one day, about 4 inches of wet, sticky snow, the perfect sculpting snow. I called Jon Parker, one of our neighbors. He and his wife were teachers and he did some fairly intricate woodworking as a hobby. They'd heard of the Brattleboro Toilet.

"Come on over, Jon. Now's the time. We'll build another toilet."

So Jon arrived a few minutes later with his son Robbie in tow. I had a couple five gallon pails and I put them both to work collecting snow from the stone patio since it was cleaner and easier than scraping snow off the lawn. We'd not been working very long when Robbie, who clearly hadn't got into the spirit of things, decided it was all a ruse to get our patio cleared. He put down his shovel and went home. Jon stuck around, though, and we kept working.

In the beginning, I think, Jon was hesitantly game. He joined in because I'd invited him. Before long, though, he got caught up in details and his precision woodworking gene took over and my work wasn't quite accurate enough. I had to get him a long bread knife so he could slice the snow to a straight and precise shape. Funny how people suddenly get on board and take a bit of ownership in a project.

In about a hour we had it finished. Word spread through the village and even up to neighboring Walgrave. People began to stop by. The toilet wasn't visible from the street like the Brattleboro Toilet since it was in what was in our "back garden". Susan and I called it our back yard but we were corrected. In England a "yard" is where you might park construction equipment, tractors and things. Was it a lawn, then? No, no. It was a garden laid to grass.

And that's the story. Facebook reminded me it happened 6 years ago. Sometimes our four and a half years in England is like another lifetime. Other times it's like just last week. 

If you'd like a street view of Hannington, the village where we lived, you can find it on Google Earth. Search for Hannington, Northamptonshire, England.