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Words on the street in Pittsfield: WordXWord Festival returns
Imagine sitting at a cafe table on North Street, or coming out of the hardware store with a bag of sunflower seeds, and hearing a woman stand up and speak: “Almost nine years earlier to the day, on a...
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l’Shannah tovah, happy new year
Rosh Hashanah began yesterday evening, and friends of mine will welcome these days with honey and apples and family. I’m thinking of you all warmly tonight. It’s not a holiday I grew up with, but it...
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Hard to keep your eyes on the road
The Green River is golden. Driving Route 43 at noon, as the sun breaks through, I lean back agains the seat and feel myself smiling spontaneously. The leaves let the light through, and here for a...
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Penny candy, Halloween masks and meltaway mints
I’m remembering Zimmerman and Fink’s tonight. On this quiet Friday evening, I’m reading a story for the Oct. 3 magazine about the 135th anniversary of Charles H. Baldwin & Sons (best vanilla in the...
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Fall colors in Berkshire Botanical Garden
On Sunday, I saw a crocus in bloom in the fall. Last time I spent a quiet hour in the botanical garden, the crocuses were blooming for Easter, and blue flowers covered the lawn near the pond and the...
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Aaron Burr, El Cid and what this blog is for
Not long ago, I visited a friend in New York. He’s an old friend and patient about listening to a lot of conversation that begins: hey, I wrote a story about that. And we followed some of those...
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Pumpkin juice
It’s a robot? It’s a percolator? We looked the coppery pumpkinfull of pipes and widgets and gizmos up and down, and my dad got it first — it’s a still! The giant pumpkin outside the general store was...
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Down the Old Mill Trail in Dalton
Working on the Dalton Community Guide — coming out on print today in time for Halloween — I looked at a map of the town and remembered how much of it is open woods. I most often see it from Routes 8...
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I suggest you go back
This Saturday at 7 p.m. in the Cornwall, Conn., Town Hall, National Heritage Fellow Dudley Laufman will call a contradance. On the weekend of January 15, 2007, he was honored at the Ralph Page Dance...
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Pinning down objectivity
Some time ago, a dear friend who works at the journalistic end of the media field (and is much more widely known than I am) challenged me on objectivity in the media. He said there was no such thing as...
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Thankful for a good talk
As I sit here, looking around my office on a quiet Monday evening, I am feeling thankful for many things. The last week has shown me how deeply kind this newsroom can be. And through a summer and fall...
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Looking for Berkshire holiday workshops
At the top of the stairs, in a room lined with wooden drawers, my mom would sit in a paint-spattered shirt and jeans with her hair in a bandana and a bright light on. Coming into the room, I was coming...
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Adventures in journalism: Starships were meant to fly
We have had a whirlwind week here at The Eagle. Changes are in the wind, and from Berkshires Week’s point of view, they’re good ones. The magazine is about to become year-round, and to run in our...
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Silk screens and iron rings
In Hinsdale once, driving down a worn road, you could have seen a former farm with fields full of sculpture made from old iron — horse shoes, picks, a fragment of wagon hitch. The artist had gone from...
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Pete Seeger’s vigor
As I sit here this week, listening to Pete Seeger sing with the Weavers in 60-year-old recordings, I am remembering an evening two years ago when Adams couples danced with potatoes on their foreheads....
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It finds an echo in my soul
I was driving along the Green River on a three degree morning to talk to a class of young journalists when I heard the news on the radio — Pete Seeger has died quietly at 94. Our local radio station...
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Thermodynamics — why journalists talk
I remember putting the phone down softly on an evening last April. I had a head full of glazes and the round sides of four-foot-tall pots glowing in a wood-fired kiln, and the feel of clay on a wheel,...
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Manchester Vermont on a sunny morning
Ann Patchett sits as a child holding the phone awkwardly against her ear, talking to her father on Christmas night. I am holding the book open, propped against the shelf to read it. I picked it up for...
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Standing over the water: View on a Berkshire footbridge
You’re late. You said 15 Minutes. I mean about 21 years late. It took you all this time to meet a fella at the footbridge. Robert Preston teases Shirley Jones in The Music Man on a summer evening....
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Tough old Gaelic roots
You might say St. Patrick gave me my name. You’d have to go back a way. Abbott is a Scots name — the sect of the MacNab, Mac an Abba, son of the Abbot. The Web tells me the name and the clan begins...
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