Summer is coming in (May 26 newsletter)

I don’t know about you, but I’ve been needing to get out. Spring is new and fresh everywhere. And after a year, live events are stirring again.

The holiday weekend is bringing our first summer wave of openings — museums and gardens and historic sites are opening their doors. James Turrell turns a water tower into a light well at Mass MoCA. (It will open to all in the museum’s daily hours and on rare days for viewings at dawn and dusk.) Young choreographers come to Chesterwood, designers to Hancock Shaker Village, sculpture to the Mount.

And music is coming back everywhere. Many of the inventive places that found ways to hold concerts even last summer, when safety allowed, are already back in play. Berkshire Theatre Group, the Foundry, the Egremont Barn, Dewey Hall.

After a year of restrictions and losses, we may get a first taste, here and there, of something wholly new. Mass MoCA holds the first outdoor performance of the season on Saturday, and alongside Bright Ideas and Aok Barbecue, they’ll have a popup Georgian cafe. In another week (June 4), Bennington Museum will open their concerts in the courtyard with jazz and tacos, and the next day R&D Island Taste will return for the summer to serve Jamaican cuisine.

Newness is coming back, a little at a time — a thread of adventure, even in simple things. A couple of days ago I went walking with a neighbor, on a night warm enough for t-shirts even well after dark, and she showed me the honey locust on the corner — the white flowers have a heady sweetness I’d never taken in before.

By the Way Berkshires is a digital magazine exploring creative life and community — art and performance, food and the outdoors — and I’m writing it for you, with local voices, because I’ve gotten to know this rich part of the world as a writer and journalist, and I want to share it with you.

If you’d like to see the website grow, you can join me for a few dollars a month, enough for a cup of coffee and a cider doughnut. Members get access to extra stories and multimedia, itineraries a bookmark tool. Let me know what you're looking for, and we’ll explore together.

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