Halfway up the slope, young maple saplings are turning vivid red and deep orange in the meadow. They’re hip high, no taller than the purple asters and the last of the golden rod ...
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Shaun Leonardo’s ‘You Walk …’ sets quests at Mass MoCA
Two women are talking together, their voices are confident and clear and touched with laughter. The elder woman repeats the word for blue heron in Apsáalooke. I have come to Wendy Red Star’s exhibit many times now, and this is the first time I have heard her language aloud — I have to thank Shaun Leonardo.
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Walking up to the Dome Trail
It’s a hot, bright day up here on the back roads — late spring spilling into summer. I’ve climbed up Henderson Road until the land flattens out, and everywhere I walk I can hear the sound of a brook close by.
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Mindy Lam infuses spring into wearable art
The flowers tangle together like meadow grass in the morning, glinting with dew, and a small bright frog is climbing up the stems. Jewelry artist and fashion designer Mindy Lam opens the summer at Berkshire Botanical Garden.
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Wishing for an Infinite Impossibility Drive
Douglas Adams died 26 years ago at this time of year, and I am feeling gently sad because he is not somewhere in the world, tubing through New Zealand caves and tracing constellations in the glow-worms on the ceilings.
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Berkshire Botanical Garden opens in spring
Trees that looked bare five days ago are shaggy with seed pods, and in the Berkshire Botanical Garden, magnolias are shedding petals. I love seeing things from the inside while people are working in their everyday clothes.
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April opens with a poem a day
Imagine a poem by Hafiz, the Sufi mystic poet, out loud in a rounded room with tall windows overlooking the mountains. The ridges are a light-imbued silver grey.
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A local woman invents a new kind of poem
This time of year, I met a woman in a stand of laurel bushes. It turns out by the time she was my age, she’d invented a new form of free-verse.
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Can we stretch out for a moment in the sun? (March 10 newsletter)
The sun is coming out today for an hour or two. Where should we go for a walk? It’s one of those unexpected early spring days that jumps ahead for a flicker, like that afternoon in mud time in the Robert Frost poem …
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Can you feel the sap running today? (March 3 newsletter)
Sweet — That scent in the air like caramel over wood smoke — it feels almost unreal after all this last year, but it’s here. The sap is boiling.
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