Black and White Snowscape

While I was driving today, I noticed.....

The landscape has been stripped of it's color. Trees and bushes, roads and mountains, everything stands out in black and white. The only bright colors belong to road signs. Even the cars have all taken on the same mud-salt-slushy hue. Occasionally an expensive, garage-housed car will zoom past in a brief flash of red or blue. The definition of nature has been rounded to unidentifiable lumps and bumps under the snow. Where stone walls used to be, now only a white ridge. Natural guardrails have appeared along rural roads, pushed there by speeding snowplows. Trees are left looking like dusty skeletons. Housetops that once were green or brown or black now all bear the same pure white cover. Swift winds drift snow across roads so there is hardly a road visible anymore. Cars drive along the road, shedding their icing in a cloud of fluff behind them. Snowmen with stark white faces and dark black eyes pop up in yards and along driveways. Figures that resemble humans are out, bundled against the cold, shovelling the front steps, or snowblowing the walk. Cars are started long before departure to attempt at a warm ride. When the sun rises, everything takes on a bright blue glow, slowly turning pink, then finally bright white as the sun reaches its full height. At night, the hills in the distance, shrouded in snow, glisten orange and pink and purple as the sun slowly makes it's way down to settle among the low hills and valleys. Family pets spend more and more time indoors, only venturing outside when absolutely necessary. During the daytime hours, cats curl up over heating vents, and beside woodstoves. Dogs find an abandoned bed to sleep on until an owner comes home and shoos them off. Life seems to slow down whenever snow falls. The quiet hiss of snow reaching the ground, or landing on trees, seems loud when there is no other sound. Sunday evenings are spent drinking cocoa with marshmallows around a fireplace or woodstove, wrapped in a wool blanket. Dreams of Spring flood nighttime imaginings. Morning arrives too soon, meaning another venture into the cold to brush off a car, to de-ice a driveway, to shovel a stair.....

Think Spring! and Good-night!