Mary and Jim Walker of Loveland walked onto the town green in Milford, Conn., on Saturday and cracked open a cooler.
Within minutes, tightly packed snowballs, courtesy of back-to-back Colorado blizzards, filled the air.
How this came to be is a wonder even to the people responsible. Fed up with shoveling, Mary Walker brought her copywriting skills to bear in a cheeky ad to sell snow and placed it on the online marketplace eBay. “It was a combination of cabin fever and ‘Here we go again,”‘ she said.
Walker didn’t expect to make a sale. But before long, e-mails began pouring in from Austria, Switzerland and Russia.
One inquiry came from Chris Hansen, 44, a firefighter from Milford. His daughters – 16, 15 and 12 – had gotten everything they wanted for Christmas. Except for snow. New England’s winter has been warm and dry.
“We were sitting at dinner and I said, ‘I’ll get some on eBay,”‘ Hansen said. “I typed in ‘snow sale.’ I thought I’d get fake snow or theatrical snow.”
Hansen found the Walker’s lot, fended off other bidders and came away with the winner: $120 and change for three snowballs. He ultimately offered $200 for all the effort.
Shipping posed a problem. Enter Denver-based Frontier Airlines, which offered to fly the Walkers and their unusual carry-on to New York for free. A limo service gave them a complimentary lift to their meeting with the Hansen family – and the snowball fight that Mother Nature couldn’t muster but the power of the Internet could.
