It was unusual to have months of snow and ice covering the ground in southern England. But not wishing to let such an opportunity slip by, that winter I began my greatest construction program ever.

A nine-year-old’s imagination is not limited by such marginal factors as sub-zero temperatures, exposure and frostbite. Time is not a factor in the realization of dreams, of bringing your ideas into hard reality.

Very hard reality, in fact. Ice hard as iron, water turned to stone.

The ground at the back of our house sloped up the hill. Right beside the house, on the northern side, was a steeper bank, separated from the house wall by a narrow ditch. It was there that the dream became reality. Hour after freezing hour I would stand in that ditch, crafting an ice village on the side of that bank.

After the first week my mother gave up calling me to come in out of the bitter cold. A man with a mission does not care about such trifles as hot chocolate and toasted muffins. Slowly the village rose from the frosty construction site.

First a one-lane road wound its way along the bank, circuitously avoiding humps of snow and the crevasses of the glacier down by the drain. That was hard enough, pounding away at ice as hard as rock to make something like a flat surface that toy cars could drive along. After many hours of back-breaking work, I discovered that warm water could do the job much easier and produce some interesting shapes as I smoothed the road while it re-froze. Developing my use of technology, I made rapid progress using mother’s hair drier attached to an extension cord until she objected (rather unreasonably, I thought) to its somewhat unorthodox use.

Once the roadway was in (complete with a terrifying section more like a bobsled run), I turned to architecture. Building with snow is not an easy task. Firstly, just try making square bricks with mittens. Then there’s the question of crumbling. Snow bricks have the annoying tendency to fall apart just at the critical stage of construction.

The first few houses were hardly recognizable, being more like some accumulation of small snowballs. But as I developed my technique, something more like human habitations took shape. Then office blocks. The skyscraper attempt ended in ignominious failure, and required some heavy repair work to the residential area it had crashed down on. (I began to see the impact of human mistakes. A lot of ice people would have died in that terrible tragedy.)

I even attempted a church, and with the newly-discovered process of spraying the construction with water from mom’s flower mister, it even held together, though the spire was decidedly skewed.

Eventually, after what must have been hundreds of hours of work in the fearsome cold, the village covered the whole length of the bank, with post office, bank, general store, gas station and all the rest. (The skating rink idea admittedly did not work too well. Pouring gallons of hot water onto the snow only melted a large hole and the end result looked more like a volcano).

I would like to have said that people came from all around to admire this creation, but at least mom and dad and brother and sister were forced to come outside and make the appropriate expressions of wonder. (They also wondered about the volcano.)

I began to lay plans to extend my village up the slope above the bank. Soon I would create a huge metropolis, a whole ice-planet maybe!

But that very morning, my great schemes turned to dust. Or more correctly, sludge. The temperature rose, and I watched in anguished horror as all my labor melted before my eyes. The office block slid down the bank and wiped out the fire station. The church imploded (with what effect on its ice-worshipers, who can tell?). The ice-rink/volcano became a lake. And before long, everything slid down into the ditch and melted down the drain. All gone, swept away.

I could hardly speak. I dragged my mother outside and just pointed. Where there had once stood a proud ice village was just the old familiar grass bank.

And if I’d known the words, I would have quoted Solomon about everything being vanity and no profit for any work under the sun (which by now had come out and was melting all the snow away). All gone. And not even a picture for the record. Only what is left in memories…

A hard lesson on the lack of permanence in this life. All that work—for what? At this time of loss I saw with crystal vision that all is temporary here. Just like my ice village, all melts, fades, dies. We search for the permanent in a world that does not know the word.

But one day, my God in whom I trust, will open up far more than an ice bank to our creativity. Worlds upon worlds, ideas beyond imagination that eyes have not seen and ears have not heard and have not even entered into our minds. One day there will be more than passing ice villages that melt in the morning sun.

One day, God will be here, with His people in His eternal city. I just want to be there, and experience God’s total creative permanence.

© Jonathan Gallagher