Red hearts are for states where you can feel your fingers in February. Vermont gets a blue one, because that's the exact color your heart turns somewhere around week nine of a winter that technically started in October and will absolutely still be hanging around in April. This is love, sure, but it's the kind you develop after the seventh straight day of gray sky, when your car is a salt sculpture and your driveway is just a suggestion made of mud.
And yet you stay. You stay for the syrup that ruins all other syrup forever, for the cheese, for the maniacs skiing on four inches of man made crust in a hoodie, for the fact that there's not a single billboard between you and the horizon. Blue heart energy: cold, loyal, slightly deranged, wouldn't live anywhere else.
Soft enough to live in through mud season, built sturdy enough to survive the woodstove, the dog, and about nine hundred wash cycles. Fits like your favorite thing already does.
