knirkende

It was the sound you noticed first, coming out the door, not the sight. You'd seen the snow through the window upstairs, feathery, neither wet nor dry, falling onto streets, footpaths, sidewalks, grass. The streetlights shone down onto it and it shone back up, illuminating the faces of the bundled people walking briskly on their whitened ways. So quiet, and every footfall creaked, the footfall of easily a hundred hurrying walkers. It sounded like a hundred windows creaking open on on oil-needy hinges, opening onto another place, and through those windows came still more snow.