The Old College Try

“Do you wanna build a snowman?”

Yvette laughed. This is what College life was about: spontaneous nonsense instead of doing assignments!

“Let’s go!” She grabbed her coat, gloves and car keys and they ran to her car, giggling like the teenagers they were.

A half hour drive up the mountain to pile snow in the centre of the bonnet, against the windscreen, was a College tradition. Making it back to College before it melted: a victory!

Scraping together enough snow from the thin layer that had fallen wasn’t easy! Plenty of others had been there before them, and were here now.

Carmen pulled sticks and a carrot from her bag. “I came prepared!”

Yvette sighed with relief - she hadn’t thought of anything like that!

It was a wonky snowman, more a triangular pile with a smaller pile on top, but that was the shape more likely to survive the drive home. Generations of tradition decreed it.

The sun was climbing the sky.

“Let’s go!” Carmen urged as she stuck in the carrot and sticks, two small rocks as eyes.

Yvette drove carefully down the winding mountain road and back to College, bits of snowman flying off and melting.

They drove into College, horn blaring. People at lunch rushed to the windows, cheering excitedly at their blob of snow. It may have helped that the carrot had slipped considerably lower.

Yvette and Carmen exchanged satisfied looks. They’d earned respect in their community for their silliness. That’s how peer groups work.