My, yes, generous stranger from Nosehair, Maine. That is a mighty big snowbank in front of your house. Thank you for sending photographs of it. As one who has lived in Maine his entire lifetime, I had no idea what snow looks like when it is scooped up against the side of a house. Fascinating, like seeing the great pyramids for the first time, or Stonehenge.

I don’t get it. If I were in Miami, wearing bright pink shirts and Bermuda shorts, I’d understand the deluge of Maine snowbank photos. “Wow!” I would say, cruising the strip and trying to shake Don Johnson off my tail. “Those snowbanks are gargantuan! Why, it certainly provides a perspective I might not otherwise get down here where it is sunny and warm. I am fully appreciative of these photographs and sympathetic to the suffering of those poor souls in Maine. Damn, that Don Johnson! How did he know I have a dead hooker in my trunk?”

But I’m not in Miami. I’m up here at 44.6 north, 70.13 west and I have snow in my yard, too. Oh, sure. It might not be as big and impressive as your snowbank but let’s not quibble. I’ve been looking at snowbanks since I first opened my eyes at age 3 (I wasn’t interested in anything until then.) and I’ve been looking at them since. Pardon my snow bigotry, but to me it all looks the same.

They’ve been coming now for several weeks, the pictures. I get them from friends who live a few blocks from me and from people I’ve never met. The photos are always the same, massive white mounds huddled up to the sides of a house like dinosaurs peeking in windows. So sudden was this onslaught of snow spam, I initially studied each picture very carefully. Surely, I thought, surely, if I look closely enough at this one, I will see that freak winds have sculpted it into a remarkable likeness of Amy Winehouse. There must be something singular about this photograph, because why else would it be sent?

Nope, nothing singular at all. These photo stalkers seem to be asserting that their snowbank is bigger than my snowbank and nothing more. But I’m secure enough in my snow masculinity that I’m not out there with a yardstick trying to dispute them.

I have surmised that the people who send photos of snow armies taking over their yards have been so beaten down by this wretched winter, they have become perversely proud of it. They want a record of the onslaught so that later, in better times, they can pore over those pictures and congratulate themselves on surviving.

That perverse pride. When gleeful relatives write us from the West Coast to brag about their 75-degree weather in January, we hate them a little. But we also take smug satisfaction in the fact that those people, with their tacky Hawaiian shirts and sunburned noses, wouldn’t last a single week up here in the tundra. And so, when we’re climbing over a 10-foot snowbank to get to our car, which will need to be scraped for the fourth time of the day, we’re miserable but consoled by the fact that we have grit. We have fortitude.

We have digital cameras. And so we take pictures of these great white monoliths with the same sense of battered awe a downed boxer must feel for the brute standing over him. On the three days in July that it’s not raining, we’ll dig out those photos and look at them with a strange sense of unreality. It will seem like something that happened to someone else in a fairy tale about white-cloaked creatures.

In spite of my sarcasm, I enjoy the photos that you send. It’s a glimpse into the weird little worlds of those who suffer as I do. We’re like soldiers on the losing end of a battle, sharing frustrations and comparing scars.

I think it’s interesting though, that none of you send me photos of your summer vacations. Not one picture of that trip you and the wife took to the adults-only resort in the Caribbean? Not a single shot of that ice cream girl you hooked up with at Old Orchard Beach?

Fine. Keep those snowbank photos coming. In the spring, I’ll put them up for voting, with points for size, unusual formation and original displays of winter frustration. Obscene gestures are encouraged. Let’s face it. At this point, they’re pretty much required.

Mark LaFlamme is the Sun Journal crime reporter. You can e-mail him at [email protected].