Let me tell you how I see the Berkshires. You’ll see stories and columns and multimedia content here that are available to all of our members. They appear throughout the website as well when they come up by category — here we’ve simply gathered them all in one place. If you’re a member, just log in to open and read them.
Some of the stories here at BTW are features. I talk with someone, and I help to tell their story. I hang out with an artist who has spent a year drawing a landscape by hand, or a naturalist with a tree frog sitting on his thumb. In stories like these, I’m doing my best to give you their point of view.
And then sometimes I’ll give you mine. After I’ve spent an afternoon backstage with the cast getting ready for a new play, maybe I’ll go see them. Reading a script and watching actors work on their roles are always fascinating and completely different. And seeing the play live is something else again. The words come alive. When a woman is protecting her family a few feet away from you, and you see her instinctively shielding her brother, you can feel her love and fear palpably.
When I write a column, I talk in my own voice. When a performance moves me, or a work of art, I’ll tell you why and how it feels. I’ll share places I find, small towns I wander through, the bookstore up the dirt road with the pot-bellied stove. Some columns I’ll share publicly, but if you join me in the work I’ll share more here with you.
Mill Brook Sugarhouse is boiling sap in a spring day around the corner from the Roaring Brook Trail, and Irish musicians are tuning up as I explore the Southern Berkshires.
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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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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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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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A child licks the dasher from a hand-crank ice cream maker. A young couple bake bread in a brick oven. Greens sprout in a warehouse in Oakland, and a cheesemonger opens a stall at a green market in Manhattan. ... From Northeast hills to bay-area sprawl, they all belong to a new generation of farmers.
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When someone puts into words a way I have been feeling, the world feels open and understandable — like walking with someone I love and seeing for the first time the way the late light hits the old wooden siloes by the railroad tracks.
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Last night I started reading a borrowed advance copy of the Greenhorns Farmers Almanac, and I had to make myself stop before last night turned into this morning.
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