I was being creative...
Really, I was being somewhat artistic...
Actually, I was fooling around, and put your picture into Paint Shop Pro, selected the carpet background, Gausian blurred it, and then motion blurred it, and came up with the following. Then, being a fool one last time, changed it to greyscale.

The full Photoshop software is pretty expensive, but you should take a look at Photoshop Elements or Corel Paint Shop Pro. Both of them are on sale now for around $50, and contain pretty much all of the tools that an amateur photographer would ever need. I've been using Paint Shop Pro ever since it was shareware (v 3.0), and it's now owned by Corel and is at version 14 (X4).

It's a cat thing -- especally black cats and drawers with white underwear...

Your camera probably measured exposure from the meadow or the sky. Since those areas are darker, the aperture opened up more than it would have if it had measured on the snow, thus causing the snow portion of the picture to overexpose, glare, and lose definition. However, exposing only on the snow would have caused the darker areas to underexpose. This would have been a good scene to use a tripod, create multiple exposures from under- to over-exposed, and use HDR software processing to create an image where all objects are correctly exposed.

Here's your picture after I imported it into Paint Shop Pro X2 and clicked on the Adjust/Smart Photo Fix setting.