Out here in our own little corner of Massachusetts, the dump trucks are ever-present this past week, taking the snow up to a farm, upstate, where it can work on the snow farm and have a happy life.

I’ve always loved the idea of a snow farm. It’s a much nicer way of saying “icy gravel pit;” its eventual fate by July.

But right now, the Department of Public Works (DPW) is diligently taking away all the snow from the sidewalks and street; the little sledding mountains and ice walls around Town are disappearing. And while my adult brain is very much thankful for the ability to walk on the sidewalk to our office, there is a small but vocal minority in my head screaming at the loss of prime igloo and fort material.

There is something magical about this kind of snow, and it’s even more poignant because we haven’t really seen snow like this in 10 years. The 2015 record snowfall was a lot of work, I can’t shy away from that. My cousin and I shoveled out the Dorchester house he grew up in, it still feels like a dozen times, to the point where we had to move snow from the front yard to the back, because we couldn’t pile it up any higher. But I remember the walls of snow and ice surrounding our streets like fortifications against the everlasting assault of the pavement. Do you remember the fields of snow covering everything like a warm blanket? Remember how that made you feel?

Snow like that changes the world; at least our little corner of it.

Again, I cannot stress enough the amount of distress my back was in last week (especially after a plow covered up all the cleared sidewalk we had shoveled not a day before), but I am also very sad when they take away the snow.

I understand, logically, that shoveling and clearing the snow would be infinitely harder with all these mounds of frozen water and little mountain paths carved into the snow like some kind of medieval mining operation, but also, it’s sad to see a whole new world taken away so quickly.

I also understand that strollers are not all-condition vehicles and persons with mobility issues probably don’t share my sense of wonder here, and by no means am I advocating here for the DPW to just leave the snow where it lies.

But these snowy paths and walls and mountains really remind me of the crenelated towers (those towers with the alternating blocks on top [I learned a new word recently and I’ll be darned if I’m not going to use it]) in medieval castles and, obviously, it’s probably a bit of nostalgia from my youth creeping in here.

But it doesn’t seem like the dangerous kind – the word “nostalgia” originates from a psychological diagnosis for soldiers returning from war. It was a kind of nonexistent homesickness. The soldiers had changed so much during their fight that their perception of the world had changed, and the sweet innocent life they left behind can never return. They’re too different and changed, and, likely, the world changed as well. As it always does.

Maybe it’s not such beneficent nostalgia after all. Above this paragraph there is a lot of talk of fortifications and castles, which can be taken as the leftover brain cells from childhood, but even if that’s the case, their function as forts or castles creates a new issue: the implication of a threat to defend against.

In my youth, that was definitely from adults. They couldn’t fit in the tunnels and forts we built, and so we had independence and authority, of a kind. Maybe that’s the magic of the snow. It’s a gift from the sky, a bit of manna from heaven that allows you to shape almost anything you want. You can pelt your best friends with snow balls, build something brand new without a nagging adult telling you you’re doing it wrong, or if you had a hill and a sled, you had speed (if the hill was steep enough and you were brave enough, you didn’t need the sled), and, perhaps most importantly for your time as a child, could breathe the breath of creation into your own snow Golem (snow men), too.

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Do you remember when your snow-folk melted? Did you feel sad, and if you did, did you feel sad for the loss of all that work, or because you felt bad for the snowman itself?

We – my family and I – live next to a school with a field. In that field, before the most recent snowfall, one could find the littered torsos and fallen heads of about three dozen snowmen the kids had built over what I assume were at least a few recesses with the meager snowfall we had before last week’s storm.

I’m reminded of the Snow Goons from Calvin and Hobbes. If you didn’t read the funnies back in the day, Calvin was an imaginative six-year-old boy with a maybe alive, maybe imagined stuffed tiger named Hobbes. You always tried to guess whether Hobbes was real or imaginary, and I think that was the point. The cat, the “big cat,” according to the author Bill Watterson, was both alive and not alive. And I’m realizing now Hobbes was always confined to a box; the cells of the comic strip itself.

Anyway, Calvin builds a Snow Goon, a snow man that comes alive and has hostile intent towards its creator, likely for all the snow carnage Calvin was always causing with his other snowmen.

And as I looked out at the remains of the snowmen before last week’s heavy snowfall, I can only imagine what the creations of all those elementary school children are doing under the snow.

Maybe keeping all those snow mounds, snow walls and fortifications isn’t a bad idea eh?

All the best, Jeff Sullivan Editor-in-Chief