"One of the things that was really frustrating for me was that I was still not finding my writing community…I wasn’t enjoying being a writer here."

"I love living in such a tiny city–I call it our Capitol Village–where you can walk everywhere and everybody knows everybody…I can’t imagine living in a better place…Right now we’re in trying times, right?"

"People that have money don't look at other people that are poor, you know. Like when my son went to school and a lot of people that had houses looked at me like I was trash sometimes… And I just wanted to fit in like everybody else."

I’ve been here since 2001…There’s some mixed feelings about what stands out during those earlier years, good and bad.

"I struggle with belonging every day. I identify with the mentally ill, also known as psychiatric survivors…I’m finding that me and my peers are consistently invisible, marginalized and even endangered."

Somebody got into [my son’s closed social media] group and was saying racial slurs and slurs against the LGBTQ community, and his friends immediately shut it down..no, that is unacceptable… that’s not ok.

"I really love a lot of Montpelier and I feel like we have a really strong sense of place here and sense of community, and I also frequently struggle with the way we continue to be divided."

I’m really fed by nature, and as I travel in New England as a African-American descended from enslaved people…and I look at how class has affected white people’s privilege and rank, nature is one of those things that has been taken away from people who look like me that we’re just getting back.

"I just love the scale of this community. To me it’s like the perfect size for a town…The richness that comes in those incidental contacts with other members of your community."

A lot of us in the 65-85 group…[we] have been the mainstay of all of the organizations in town, for decades, and we are aging out, and we are seeing that the next layers…have different demands on their time, they’re not going to be able to do it the way we’ve done it.

For the last 9 years I lived in the Heartbreak Hotel in Plainfield, which was totally destroyed in this year’s flood…It was a really special place…very homey feeling. I just couldn’t really imagine myself living anywhere else.

The different relationships in my early time working for the Vermont Historical Society: getting to know some of the volunteers: older women who had spent their whole lives in Montpelier and Barre and who took me under their wing.

When your talent you have, your skill to share in the community is found valuable and appreciated, [that] makes you feel belonging…I am married here, I have a job…and I have my non-profit project [Shidaa Projects, Inc]…so the belonging has been over time.

The Coop in Montpelier…that always felt like a place where you could just meet people and talk, right? And….it was all around food, handmade foods, eating and sharing food.

I find that as I go around when I’m on crutches or when I’m using the chair, people are very conscious of the limitations and very helpful. The people around here are great. The buildings, on the other hand, aren’t.

When I think about my sense of belonging in Montpelier…I think about my neighbors and the space that we had to just relax outside…it was just a place to be.