Oak Hill in the Snow

As the snow builds up on the ground it is slowly erasing the familiar world, creating a blank canvas where any kind of landscape might be latent.
It was a day like this — dark gray, the world slowly being swept away behind gusts of snow — the first time I picked up The Green Bay Tree as a young man. It is the first book, the first bestseller, by Louis Bromfield: a story that takes place in Mansfield. As I turned the pages of the old novel the modern city around me drifted, blurred, darkened; and in the book that other Mansfield — the city from 100 years ago — stirred and took life....

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