I used to say people who dye their hair are liars.
That was the cheap version.
The true one is quieter.
They prefer a false room.
A woman in her eighties looks in the mirror at a full head of auburn-brown and calls it morning. Time happened. The bottle says it didn’t. I am sixty. My hair is white. The record is in the glass whether I like it or not.
That is the civic story of this town since June 2020. Not a salon. A refusal to live in the same year as the damage.
I am writing from a hospital bed. Cardioversion failed. The atrial fibrillation that entered my life after the video went up is still running its crooked weather through the chest. I will not pin a diagnosis on a committee. I know the dates. June 6, 2020, I walked onto the Iron Bridge because they had closed the road beside my studio without telling the person who still had to get to work. I still had to get to work. June 9 a friend sent a link. By the time I saw it, the edited clip had been viewed by more than twenty thousand people. In the days that followed, my heart went over. It did not come back for a month. Institutions that could have dialed a number chose a finished surface instead.
A phone call in the first week of June could have interrupted the mythology. I would have shown them the stones already in the ground. To my knowledge, neither Szpila nor the committee contacted me in the days after the video and the petition. That is not a theory about hair dye. That is a receiver that never rang.
Annette Szpila chairs the Bridge of Flowers Committee. In public, no shred of gray. On June 12, 2020, she told the Greenfield Recorder the committee was already “having conversations” about a petition to strip my work off a publicly owned span. On June 19 she told the same paper they wanted to “honor the anti-racism spirit of the petition.” At the 2025 ribbon-cutting after the $3.2 million renovation, I asked her about those sentences. My recollection is that she denied making them and said there was nothing in writing.
The writing is in the paper. The paper is still online. The hair is still brown.
The petition had an author. Bianca Cavanaugh-Green wanted “his stupid bench out of our town,” asked the feed how to start a petition, and then wrote one. Pink at the origin. She told the Recorder she had done it after watching a Facebook video of June 6. A viewer with a form. The form said I had disrespected the community and, more important, the Black community. It said I was hostile, smiling, invading space, filled with hate, racism, disrespect, and ego. It put the words “police lives matter most” in my mouth and declared that this meant Black lives mattered less. The petition was later removed from Change.org. The committee chair still gave the petition’s premise the word spirit. Clip, paragraph, quote, plaque. No knock on the studio door.
My work was already on their bridge. Mason Paul Forth incorporated the Black Stones of Africa into the fountain and bench as a memorial tied to his mixed-race children. They later parked an anti-racism plaque a few feet away and never, that I have heard, named the stones. Ann Lofquist painted the lasting plaque. When she was still a friend she told me there had been closed meetings about me, that Kay Berenson was running them, and that they threw me under the bus. I have no minutes. I have her sentence. I have not located publicly available minutes of meetings concerning me. I asked Berenson, a former Recorder publisher and Women’s Club officer, for an account of those discussions. She did not answer. She called the police. After a year of requests and responses that did not produce the records I sought, what I was told amounted to a greeting. Hi. Hello.
A question becomes a cop. A cop becomes a hello. A hello becomes the official version of a year.
Szpila has been publicly identified as chair since at least 2019. Seven years. The committee’s own website says membership is by nomination and a vote of the people already inside. That is not an election by Shelburne or Buckland residents. It is succession in sensible shoes. To my knowledge, she no longer lives in Shelburne. A volunteer may move. But a public landmark should not, in my view, be governed indefinitely by a room the public cannot enter. The 2026 roster appears, by the names publicly listed, to consist entirely of women. Its parent body is a women’s club. I have found no complete published historical roster, no public officer-term structure, and no clear public route into the committee. Produce the roster. Publish the terms. Explain the selection rules. Until then, “even more inclusive than the bridge already is” is a sentence about annuals, not about power.
After the renovation a committee member told the Recorder that the soil had not supported growth, so truckloads would come out and go in. A contractor told me the correction was approximately $60,000. I have not seen the spec, the bid, the vote, the invoice, or the check. The laminated sign said the plants were not thriving. That is a symptom with good manners. Cause would look like gray.
I wrote the Fire District, the boards, the committee. In my experience the letters went into the same bottle as the 2020 quotes. Silence is not peace. Silence is how a newspaper sentence becomes, years later, a private note to a landlord asking that I be put on the street. Brad Walker would not do it. He offered a mediator. The town offered the finished surface.
This river has carried messages before. Local accounts of September 1924 describe crosses burning on the Buckland hill and a small one coming down the Deerfield on a raft. I am not hanging hoods on a garden club. I am saying this valley knows how to send a story by water and then act as if the water were neutral.
They did not have to hate me. They only had to prefer the room where June never happened, where the petition was spirit, where the soil was merely “not right,” where the police file was a greeting, where the chair’s hair is still auburn and the missed call is not part of the arrangement.
Gray is what grows when you stop pouring. I have it. The record has it. The river has it. Pocumtuck State of Mind is the work on the other side of the refusal: historically specific figures on specific ground, an Indigenous council with actual authority, steel reclaimed from the factory that helped silence the falls. It is online. No login. No fee. It does not require anyone to go white. It requires someone to admit the year.
They can keep the garden looking like a postcard. They cannot keep calling the postcard the truth. The mirror already knows. The bottle is empty. The phone still works.
JFS