Writing

So much for posting on Friday. Getting back into the habit of writing on a regular basis can be difficult – at least it is for me. It did feel good to login and just write for the 15 minutes, though, today. I need to remember how that feels and try harder to keep tapping away at the lappie until – how does that go? I just do it.

The writing prompt from the other day stayed with the ‘senses’ working with the sense of sound. Here is my response – it took me about 20 minutes and I still have more I’d like to explore when writing about sound. Remember, the responses to these writing prompts can be raw lists of thoughts, random blather or whatever comes to mind.

Lately, I prefer silence – or the absence of sound. After spending as much time as I do in a noisy, busy office, then going home to a noisy, chaos-fueled home, a little “absence of sound” is very much welcome.

I thought for a long time about this post over the weekend, and if I had to choose a sound to write about, I think I would choose the sound of snow. Snow has a sound; you just have to listen carefully for it.

Dogs and horses running through snow sounds muffled – underwater, almost – like the sound has to push through unaccustomed density. Even my old dog, who will be 11 this summer, takes on a puppy-like attitude, shoving her face deeper and deeper into the snow to sniff whatever is under there, then comes up licking her chops and goes back for more. She leaps from snow bank to snow bank – fwumph-fwumph-fwumph – as if she has never experienced snow before and is surprised something so clean and white could be that cold.

Snow falling in wind has a sound, too. It swirls and dances, creating waves and drifts in the yard. Piles itself into frosting-on-a-cake peaks and valleys adorning barns and fences and trees.

Snow falling on the roof of my house – if there is enough of it – is insulating, at least in my mind. With a heavy layer of snow curving over the eaves, banking up under windows, blocking doors – I feel as though we should hibernate. Turn off the TV, the radio, the computer, the lights – and sit quietly, as though a seed buried just below the earth’s surface, covered in snow – and wait for spring.

If I could, I would listen to the snow fall all day. And I can. It has not stopped snowing since Friday night.