Jesse Lacy
It is the winter of 2013, and I am wandering into the forest behind my parents’ and grandparents’ trailers to find sticks for the arms of my little sister’s snowman made of mucky day-old snow. Our parents are working. Or they have worked overnight, and they are sleeping. But my little sister has built a snowman, and she is too afraid to go into the woods to retrieve its arms, and she is tired of wearing her snowthings, and I don’t want to go through the motions of putting them back on her—buttoning the coat, tugging the boots. So I put on my father’s coat and wander into the woods to find two good sticks for her.
In a tiny clearing, teenagers with blankets wrapped over their winter coats sit on snow-sludgy sleeping bags abandoned by the unhoused while they pass around a joint. Upon my intrusion into their clearing, they chase me away, across the road and away from the forest. I am old enough to know these teenagers lead more interesting, dangerous lives than I do, but I am not yet old enough to understand why. I sit by a lake near the road for a while, abandoning my sisterly favor, my pink ungloved hands burning in the cold. This is the first time I think about the irony of my neighborhood’s name, Regency Fields. It implies ornateness, a sense of aristocracy. Once, my mother asked the mother of my little sister’s friend where they lived. “We live in the houses up the hill,” the friend-mother said.
I am twelve. It is the awkward early December days before anything feels festive, when school is still in session and nothing feels seasonal except the short, cold days.
A father and son cast their rods into the lake across from me. I do not want to be seen by them, so I return to my grandparents’ lot.
When I open the door to Granny’s home, it is full of snowmen. As far as I remember, it has always been this way. For the entire calendar year, stuffed snowmen sit on the sofa. I need to push them aside to find a place to sit. Dancing, singing Christmas statues buzzing lo-fi renditions of Frosty the Snowman sit in front of her entertainment center, the makeshift hearth of her single-wide. A snowman throw blanket hangs over the back of my step-grandfather Gramps’s blue recliner. Wooden shelves affixed to rough, floral papered walls house hundreds of little glass snowmen of various shapes and statures. Where there are no shelves, framed prints of snowmen line the walls, the kind you would see in a hotel lobby on Christmas.
Disney’s Frozen has just hit theaters, so now giant stuffed Olaf takes residence among the sofa snowmen. My grandparents have gone to see the movie together for the second time. Like usual, they paid me ten dollars and a cheeseburger from Sonic to cross our neighboring lawns and babysit my eighty-something great-grandmother, Grandma Curtis.
Every time I babysit Grandma Curtis, who has dementia, she looks around the festive living room and asks me, “Is it almost Christmas-time?” Today, I can say yes. I want to ask her my questions, too, about our family and our history and the why behind Granny’s snowmen, but I have been told to answer her questions and to not ask my own. Once, I asked her about my grandmother’s first marriage. Her blood pressure skyrocketed, allegedly, and I am now forbidden from further questioning. In the boring gaps between her questions and my answers, I watch game shows or play on my Nintendo 3DS or scroll obscure Wikipedia articles on the household computer or daydream about somewhere far away from here.
Somewhere like Brussels, where in 1511, it is the winter of death. Where the people are dogged by famine, plague, the bitter cold—and the city is teeming with snowmen. City officials have called for a festival to lighten the peoples’ spirits, and the people have responded. Snow-prostitutes and snow-nuns stand alongside each other in the city’s red-light district. A snowboy pisses into the open mouths of the snowmen beneath him. Drunken snow-politicians sodomize each other in the town square. Nearly every snow sculpture is sexual or scatological in nature. Upper-class Hapsburg loyalists attempt to build their own polite sculptures, and they are immediately torn down and replaced by glimmering snowpenises. Why adhere to politeness when, in truth, politeness is only afforded to the landowning classes? I admire the Medieval peasants of Brussels and their festive expressions of their corrupt inner truths. I would like to imagine Granny to have her own corrupt interior—her own audaciousness, but the grandmother I know is timid, clutching whatever kernels of politeness have been doled out to her.
In the past, when I’ve asked Granny about her snowmen, she tells me that she just likes them. They’re cute. They make her happy. But I imagine my child-grandmother having a radio, listening to forgotten pop country star Gene Audrey’s version of Frosty the Snowman for the first time. Growing up, I heard the movie and the Kimberly Locke versions, but each rendition of Frosty is largely the same: the lyrics, the jingle bells, the pervading, oppressive happiness. There is no sorrow in Frosty the Snowman. There is no sorrow in Christmas, either: there is food on the table, money for presents, an electronic fire flickering onscreen in the fake hearth of Granny’s manufactured home. I imagine there is some sorrow buried deep within Granny, that it is the same sorrow I bear, that she tucks it beneath abstracted balls of white fluff, a warmer kind of snow.
When I’ve asked “Why all year, though?” Granny tells me that it’s easier to leave the snowmen up—there are too many to repeat arranging them so carefully each winter—and everyone needs a little rebellion, anyway. I’ll understand when I’m older. Brussels was a rebellion, I think, daydreaming.
As I babysit Grandma Curtis, the air in Granny’s trailer thickens: the thermostat remains at a smoldering eighty degrees, and the smell of rotten fruit hangs around, even when the fruit bowl is empty and the fridge contains nothing except cans of diet soda. Grandma Curtis coughs and stirs. She says she needs to walk and get something.
I follow her. I can get it for her. She tells me to stop following her. “I’m sorry,” I say. “I need to follow you.” She stumbles, maybe on purpose—she does things like this when she is told what to do. She falls. She’s bleeding from the head. Oh god, I think. So old and with a head injury. I gather a bunch of paper towels and have her hold them there. I call my father instead of nine-one-one. He picks up and groggily tells me to hang up and call nine-one-one. I do. They come.
“We see this all the time,” one of the nicer EMTs tells me. I am old enough to know when empathetic people see the panic and unease in my eyes and try to quell it. But I am quietly inconsolable. I have failed at caring, the only thing I am good for. “Thanks,” I tell him matter-of-factly, as my eyes continue burning. Apparently, the skin on Grandma Curtis’s head is so thin that brushing against the sandpapery wall flaked some of her scalp off, the way fresh snow can be brushed off windshields.
Everyone shows up at once after that: my father, Granny, Gramps. “You did the best you could,” Granny says, slipping me another ten, a bonus for my failure which makes no sense to me. Her watery blue eyes are the saddest I have ever seen them. I know she isn’t worried about Grandma Curtis. I am not yet old enough to understand she is worried about me. I will remain a child that winter, oblivious to the way Granny stays cooped up—mere meters away—when my father’s father visits us for Christmas with his wife, a woman my mother’s age, bringing us piles of presents in their fancy new car—their car which will sit in the driveway near the same spot where right now an armless gray snowman begins to melt.
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Jesse Lacy is a third-year MFA candidate in nonfiction and fiction at Virginia Commonwealth University where they served as the 2025–2026 Senior Nonfiction Editor at Blackbird. You can read their lyric essay, “Roadmarks,” in Roxane Gay’s emerging writers series at The Audacity. They are currently at work on a novel about the extractive tourism industry in Appalachia and a memoir about their Nana winning the lottery.