Snow, unilike all other forms of precipitation, is silent. It is not just silent in its fall, It's also silencing when it sits on the ground, especially when it's fresh and full of air pockets. Kevin Pollard has a useful summary of the silent qualities of snow on his blog, and the US Army has investigated the muffling qualities of snow (useful to know if you use acoustics to analyze, for example, gunshot noise). Old packed snow, and snow piled alongside cleared roads and sidewalks, isn't nearly as muffling.
Winter seems like a damper on all the senses. I've long noticed that spring in Minnesota is when you can smell things again... maybe this is why it's seemed so springlike of late. Apparently snow can dampen dogs sense of smell (tell that to Anya). And of course it's darker.
No wonder depression is often exacerbated by wintertime.
One of the points of this blog has been that in making an indoor world, especially in times of heat and cold, we've taken ourselves out of the seasonal cycles. We have lessened their effects on us. I was very interested to see this article this morning, in which researchers discovered it was normal, up until artificial light made "staying up" more normal, to have two stretches of sleep in a night, with a waking period between. I expect that seasonally—in winter—this would have been even more pronounced...
Mama in her kerchief and I in my cap
Had just settled down for a long winter's nap...
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