A Gnome-icide

At the end of February, we lost all our snow.  The last of the drifts and snow piles melted.  I took a little time to walk around and assess the flowerbeds. (Confession, I was looking to see if any of my crocuses were up yet.  They weren't).

While I saw only the teeniest of tips on the daffodils sprouting on the south side of the house, there were no other flowers waking up yet.  

Walking around to the front side of the house, I was startled to come upon a crime scene.  It appears that over the winter there had been a gnome-icide!!  Mr. and Mrs. Garden Gnome were lying face down in the flowerbed that is to the north of my front steps, and Mr. Garden Gnome had been smashed to bits!

At first I was afraid it was a double gnome-icide, but as I carefully lifted Mrs. Garden Gnome off the remains of her husband I could see that she had been prostrate with grief but otherwise unharmed.

Mr. Garden Gnome, however, was definitely a goner, and looked like he'd been departed for quite some time.  I'm pretty sure they had been covered over in a snow drift for many weeks prior to our weather warming up.  So at this point, there was no evidence of who had perpetrated this heinous crime. 

Even a sunnier day turned up no clues.  Was it the house deer that ate the arborvitae further down the flowerbed during the coldest part of the winter?  Did one of them, digging in the snow for plant matter to eat from the flowerbed, stomp Mr. Garden Gnome to death accidentally?  The snow had melted away and there were no telling deer prints found.

Or perhaps a delivery person carrying a package to the porch trudged through the drifted snow and thought they were on the sidewalk but really they were in my flowerbed and stepped onto a blown-over and buried in a drift Mr. Garden Gnome, crushing him with their human weight?  

This theory has been discarded since no packages were delivered to the front porch during the really cold and snowy weeks, all delivery drivers propped packages up against the garage doors where the approach had been plowed clear.

Or, (given the state I found this couple in with Mrs. Garden Gnome grieving over her poor mutilated  husband this one might be the true answer,) had Mr. Garden Gnome developed a small crack (or many small cracks) last fall into which water seeped.  And then when our super frigid January came had that moisture frozen, expanding in the process, and blown him apart? 

Or, maybe he had fallen over earlier in the winter, taken on water which later froze, then a stiff wind during a snowstorm blew Mrs. Garden Gnome into him and her touch was the kiss of death, with just enough force to undo him?

We may never know.

Unless Mrs. Garden Gnome shows up this spring with a new paint job and is found cavorting around the flower beds like a merry widow.