Exploring country roads in lilac time

Lilac time is here now … These are the few evenings in a year when I can sit on the front steps in the evening and feel petals blow against my shoulder. The scent feels tangible … and telepathic. Lilacs have always had magic for me. They hold my attention. They play with time. They tell me these few days are not like anything else, and they pull me out to sit in the evening while the light moves imperceptibly into dusk.

Right now I find I’m looking for that kind feeling — something simple and close by that shakes me out of my thoughts. Storm clouds skim over the trails at Performance Space 21 and turn half the sky swirling dark and half vivid blue. The Lost Lamb Bakery in Stockbridge gives me an almond criossant with a generous filling of almond paste rich with vanilla.

They surprise me into remembering something glad and strange, sensory and living, like buds opening. This moment of the year seems to tell time by flowers. We’re half-past columbine and a quarter to wild azalea … the minute hand is on the yellow lady slippers Thom Smith once showed me years ago, on a trail where we heard a scarlet tanager. The wild viburnum should be blooming on the high paths on the dome and Lenox Mountain.

I want to see and breathe them as long as they’re here. The evenings are growing longer now, and it’s a good time to talk with someone in the quiet, with the sound of wind in the leaves.

This weekend …

Artists talk about their work at the Marble House, actors open the season at Shakesepare & Company and at Performance Space 21 in Chatham, N.Y., and the Metropolitan Opera comes to the Mahaiwe on the big screen, live in HD …

Events coming up …

Find more art and performance, outdoors and food in the BTW events calendar.

The bell of a trumpet reflects the town and trees around the player.
Mar 28 2024 @ 5:00 pm
There was a time in the 1950s when musical giants gathered the Berkshires. Be-boppers, folk singers, African drummers, blues singers, jazz legends, poets, and musicologists gathered at a place called Music Inn.
Anthony Hopkins appears as Frank Doel in the bookshop at 84 Charing Cross Road. Film still courtesy of the Clark Art Institute
Mar 28 2024 @ 6:00 pm
New York City bibliophile Helene Hanff (Anne Bancroft) writes to the London bookshop Marks & Co in search of books she has not been able to find at home.
Close up, the strings and pegs of an electric guitar gleam silver in the dark.
Mar 28 2024 @ 7:30 pm
The Eggmen perform a best of the Beatles tribute live at the Egremont Barn, a performance venue in a tavern atmosphere.

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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