Excerpt from The Good End of Pleasant Street
By Heather Kirn Lanier•June 2026 Sun Magazine
My husband and I arrived in the Green Mountains of Vermont with a lease for an apartment we’d never seen, a one-year-old who might never walk, and, though we didn’t know it at the time, a week-old embryo inside me.
We also arrived with a contract for my husband, Justin, to be the priest at an Episcopal church, meaning I arrived as the priest’s wife. (I thought of myself instead as the priest’s spouse, to erase images of aproned shirtdresses and Jell-O salads.) Having just resigned from my gig as a visiting professor in Ohio, I had no job, which left me with dueling desires: to have another baby and to be more than a mother. Could this new life be a container for all my desires, or would some of them never fit? Did I want too much?
The town was beautiful. Low, verdant mountains were covered in massive, broccoli-like trees. Two-lane roads wound past wood-signed country stores and weathered white Victorians. Billboards were against the law. In Vermont you couldn’t obscure the trees. The trees won. Trees did not pay cash, however, so the economy was not booming, and salaries were low.
We’d arranged to rent the first floor of a house on Pleasant Street for $1,000 a month. Most of the locals didn’t have pleasant things to say about Pleasant Street, which was home to a large, dilapidated apartment complex said to be filled with drugs and crime and cockroaches, but my husband had reached out to a future parishioner who lived on Pleasant: What did she think?
“You’ll be on the good end,” she told us. She was not on the good end, and she was just fine.
Pleasant Street was only five blocks long, but no matter how small a place is, we humans are great at dividing it: Good and bad. Friend and foe. My spiritual practices had taught me to be wary of such categories.
I would spend the next two years trying to figure out which end of that good-bad spectrum my life occupied….
…Justin and I live in a new house now, in a new state, and I’m teaching full-time. There are still problems: special ed battles, broken appliances, the chaos of juggling work and writing with children and dishes. I still struggle to know when to accept reality as it is and when to take action, when to ignore an itch and when to scratch. I want Sister to give me the answers through my laptop screen, but she only ever asks questions. At the end of our sessions she always says, “What do you want from God? What do you need?”
I’d once thought desires lived on a spectrum from good to bad, like a street in a beautiful, struggling Vermont town. A good desire: advocating for your child. A bad desire: wanting to run away for a week. Now I know that desires are like nesting dolls—the big, loud, surface-level ones containing the small, vital ones. You can split the big ones open, toss aside your hunger for new pants or better furniture, and find inside them a singular longing that can look many ways but is always the same and never to blame: You want more life.
The Good End of Pleasant Street By Heather Kirn Lanier•June 2026 Sun Magazine, retrieved June 20, 2026
Invitation: “I’d once thought… ”
Heather is a poet, essayist, teacher, and thrift-store shopper. She is the author of the memoir, Raising a Rare Girl (Penguin Press, July 2020), a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice, along with two award-winning poetry chapbooks, The Story You Tell Yourself, and Heart-Shaped Bed in Hiroshima. Her full-length poetry collection, Psalms of Unknowing, was called “a powerful poetic reckoning with motherhood and religion” by Kirkus Reviews.
Heather often writes at the intersections of spirituality, motherhood, and feminism. She is the recipient of a Vermont Creation Grant, an Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Award, and a New Jersey Artist’s Fellowship. Her essays and poems have been published in The Atlantic, TIME, The Sun, Salon, Brevity, Vela Magazine, Longreads, and elsewhere. Her TED talk, “’Good’ and ‘Bad’ Are Incomplete Stories We Tell Ourselves,” has been viewed three million times and translated into 18 languages. Her essay, “Out There I Have to Smile,” was among the top 10 most-read Longreads essays of 2021.
You can access Heathers work on her substack as well.
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June Courageous Citizen
Enjoy Dennis Kucinich’s wisdom below.
“Mr. Speaker, we make war with such certainty, yet we are befuddled how to create peace. This paradox requires reflection if we are to survive. Making and endorsing war requires a secret love of death, and a fearful desire to embrace annihilation. Creating peace requires compassion, putting ourselves in the other person’s place, and all of their suffering and all of their hopes and to act from our heart’s capacity to love, not fear.”
Dennis Kucinich, at this link by Robert Shetterly
June 1, 2026
For our June Americans Who Tell the Truth feature, we chose Dennis Kucinich because he has spent a lifetime holding onto ideas that many people considered politically inconvenient: peace, public good over private profit, environmental responsibility, and the belief that government should serve ordinary people, not power. Whether people agreed with him o…
This. "Now I know that desires are like nesting dolls—the big, loud, surface-level ones containing the small, vital ones. You can split the big ones open, toss aside your hunger for new pants or better furniture, and find inside them a singular longing that can look many ways but is always the same and never to blame: You want more life."
I appreciate this image of desires like nesting dolls. And, her conclusion -- "You want more life."
🥹thank you for this gift!