I didn’t see these snowmen when they were first made. I’m sure they were beautiful and white once upon a time. This is what they look like now as our beautiful white snow deteriorates into crappy old dirt-snow.

Mudmen mudmen mudmen mudmen. Mudmen mudmen all day long. Bom-ba-dum-bum bum-bum-bum-bum. How you like our mudmen song?

I don’t know what made me think of that day. It was back when I was about a high school sophomore and we had a huge late winter rain storm and Sault Ste. Siberia was totally mud. My friend Helen and I walked up Easterday hill to the brand spankin’ new college apartment-type dwellings where we met up with a woman who was supposed to teach us how to play the flute.

I was lusting after anyone who could give me flute lessons besides the band director who was crappy as all getout at teaching the flute (and directing the band, for that matter). Mrs. Boland had been our private flute teacher in 8th grade and she was WONDERFUL! She was young and beautiful and friendly and she got me started on all kinds of fun classical repertoire (Mozart Concerto in G and Faure’s Fantasie were the first). She taught me how to flutter tongue and *accurately* count when switching from duplets to triplets (from there, I learned how to count quintuplets and septuplets and 11’s and 13’s and whatever). She was a wonderful, caring teacher for me and my friends and we loved her.

Alas, Mrs. Boland was married to a young air force guy and after a year or so, she was gone, off following her husband into the wild blue yonder.

The Commander was always willing to pay for music lessons for me and was hot on the trail of anyone she could find who could teach someone like me. That wasn’t easy up in our rugged Sault Ste. Siberian outpost. And so she found this woman up in the newfangled college apartments on the hill. Alas, I never quite figured out what the deal was but all of a sudden, after about two lessons, we weren’t taking lessons from that woman any more. She seemed to be sort of okay to me except that she was a bit smart-alecky. Mrs. Boland was NEVER like that. Mrs. B had a wonderful knack for respectfully teaching young students.

I don’t remember much about that short-lived flute teacher in the newfangled college apartments but I will never forget that day of sloshing around town through huge mud-puddles and singing the mudmen song at the top of our lungs.

We are in a frickin’ thaw and freeze cycle here on The Planet Ann Arbor today. Our sidewalks are MOSTLY dry but there are puddles here and there and the temperature is supposed to drop into the teens tonight so there will be very random patches of black ice. 60 by Tuesday? Could be but we’ll see…

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