The Swedish Word for Joy.

The dental hygienist tells me about fishing trips to Lake Ontario, sailing far out into the lake where the land was no longer visible. Like the ocean she tells me. You can’t do that in Vermont.

With her gloved thumb, she presses on my lower jaw, my source of infection and misery and a veritable hemorrhage of money. The December before the pandemic, an oral surgeon took a scalpel to my gum and cut. A few days later, my brother and his girlfriend arrived for the holidays. He grilled on the back porch and drank beer while I leaned against the clapboards. In the kitchen, my daughters and his girlfriend cooked and baked.

On his phone, we studied footage of China, closed up and quarantined, back in the days when we couldn’t envision our own streets and highways closed up, the border closed between Vermont and my brother’s house in New Hampshire.

In a world of enormous possibilities, that bone infection is currently on the down low. The hygienist tells me I wouldn’t believe the things she’s seen — fishing, and in the dentist’s office. On my way out, she cheerily reminds me about floss.

Here’s a 100-story of mine published this morning about happiness.

“The ability to tell your own story, in words or images, is already a victory, already a revolt.” 

— Rebecca Solnit