Where would I explore this weekend, if I could be anywhere at the blink of an eye? I might head east over the ridge on Saturday for hot roast chestnuts and live music at Big River Farm near the Deerfield River.
We’re at the height of the leaves now, and the back roads are turning brighter. While the weather holds, we might take a fall walk … or catch the last days of Edvard Munch at the Clark, or the new Chinwag podcast at Mass MoCA … or move with the fiddles at a contra dance in Williamstown, or compare apple and pumpkin pies in Sheffield.
On Sunday, another look eastward, the Yiddish Book Center re-opens with a global exhibit on the reach of language —in theater and music, women’s voices, fiction and memoir and the press. And ‘English,’ Sanaz Toossi’s Pulitzer prizewinning play, finishes the fall season at Barrington Stage. I’ll explore tell you more about both as I see them.
I’ve seen beauty in both of them — resilience, the deep strength of human connection. They hold the wonder of coming close to someone and seeing the world open out around you.
They remind me how I feel, alive, awake, gentle, when I stand in a sukkah on a fall night as children shake palm fronds to celebrate harvest time and I breathe the lemon scent of the citron, and when I talk in my kitchen with a Fulbright TA from Cairo as she makes coffee warmed with sugar and cardamom and tells me stories of home.
Edvard Munch paintings show Norse forest and lights in the distance at the Clark, in the show’s final weekend, as chestnuts ripen in the hills.
Points of light show in a blue-green sky over dark hills in Edvard Munch's Starry Night, 1922–24. Munchmuseet. Artists Rights Society , New York. Press photo courtesy of the Clark Art Institute.
Events coming up …
Find more art and performance, outdoors and food in the BTW events calendar.
