Brothers Cody Lebrun, 16, and Dylan Lebrun, 14, stand in front of the gigantic snowman they built in front of their home at 244 Prospect St. in Woonsocket’s North End on Saturday. Call photo/Joseph B. Nadeau

By JOSEPH B. NADEAU
 
WOONSOCKET — There are front yard snowmen, and then there are front yard snowmen. Anyone driving by 244 Prospect St. on Saturday would have been able to tell you that.

That’s because the snowman sitting out in the bright winter sunshine in very comfortable mid-20s temperatures was a really, really big snowman.
It was made by Cody and Dylan Lebrun over the past two days and topped their family’s bid for snowman fame last winter with a big jump in height and girth.
“We decided to go all out this year,” Cody, 16, said while describing the family’s snowman construction effort.
“We wanted to build it as big as we could,” he said.
Luckily Mother Nature had provided a healthy helping of the white stuff needed to bring snowmen to life during two recent snow storms and the January cold also contributed by fending off any melting.
To get the project started, Cody said he and Dylan, 14, put together a wooden form for a base and began to fill it with snow scraped from the yard. Other family members helped but Cody said absolutely no machinery was used in the monster snowman’s creation.
“It came out awesome,” Dylan said of the completed project. “We had to wet the snow a bit, and put water around the arms, but it worked,” he said. At best guess, the snowman stands about 11 to 12 feet tall on the lawn and is wider than a pitching mound at its base.
The face of the snowman was big enough for the snow artists to use cut pieces of a small tree to create its features. Limbs, rather than twigs, were stuck into the body for arms.
The snowman is big enough to cause an observer to ponder the question of how long it might last. Then end of February? March?
Cody and Dylan believe there is enough snow piled up on their North End lawn to last even longer if this winter’s weather remains on the cold side.
“I think it will last until April,” Dylan predicted. Cody had a longer bet in mind, one in keeping with the snow melt that occurs in Mount Washington’s Tuckerman’s Ravine each year.
“I think it will last until summer,” he said.