The snowman records a happiness that nobody expected to preserve permanently.

Some of the best afternoons produce nothing that lasts. A snowman is built with real effort by people who know it will be gone in three days, and the knowing does not reduce the pleasure at all. What gets kept is not the object but the hour, held by whoever was there and by a photograph nobody meant to take seriously.

Let yourself put proper effort into something temporary this week: a meal, a sandcastle, a room arranged for one evening. Resist the calculation about whether it is worth it. Impermanence is the ordinary condition of nearly everything good, and it has never made any of it pointless.