‘Blue and bluer still’

Welcome to Boston!

“When the cold comes to New England it arrives in sheets of sleet and ice. In December, the wind wraps itself around bare trees and twists in between husbands and wives asleep in their beds. It shakes the shingles from the roofs and sifts through cracks in the plaster. The only green things left are the holly bushes and the old boxwood hedges in the village, and these are often painted white with snow. Chipmunks and weasels come to nest in basements and barns; owls find their way into attics. At night, the dark is blue and bluer still, as sapphire of night.”

—Alice Hoffman (born 1952), Boston-based novelist, in Here on Earth.

The plot involves a woman named March Murray, who returns with her teenage daughter to the small Massachusetts town where she grew up, in a story inspired by the 1847 Emily Brontë novel Wuthering Heights. In the town, March is reunited with the boy she fell in love with years before. But, "{I}n heaven and in our dreams, love is simple and glorious. But it is something altogether different here on earth.…"

“Winter,” by Alfons Mucha (1896)