Sunny fall days comfort us with apples (#Berkshireweekend)

Some of us picked up bags of apples from Lakeview Orchard — Macouns, Jonagolds, Honeycrisps, Cortlands and Galas. Some were setting up in a friend’s kitchen, an old house they were renting then, up at the end of White Oak Road, almost on the Vermont Border, a few feet from meadow and trails.

We were assembling cutting boards and finding Shaker-style peelers at the Apple Barn, the kind with a turning handle and a blade that will peel and slice the apple in a spiral and core it as you go.

For a few falls,awhile ago, friends of mine would spend a day together making apple sauce. I remember the buzz in the preparations. As my friend Chris said, laughing, some of us walked in the door and said apples! and some of us said gadgets! Everyone headed purposefully to get their hands in.

The kitchen and living room filled wth people cutting up apples, piling the slides into pots on the stove and stirring them down, and feeding the mush into the tall funnelled foley mill that mushed the cooked fruit into sauce and fed the peels and seeds into an old glass baking dish for the compost.

Something about milling around in the kitchen makes for good talk, while your hands are moving and your minds are free.

Events coming up …

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

Wildflowers bloom on Stone Hill with the Clark Art Institute in the distance. Press photo courtesy of the museum
May 7 2024 @ 5:30 pm
In this Research and Academic Program lecture, Michael Gaudio (University of Minnesota / Clark Professor 2023–2024) explores Native burial mounds.
People gather among the local restaurants, taco truck and microbrewery in the Mass MoCA courtyard at night.
May 8 2024 @ 10:00 am
On the day of each new moon — believed by many to be a time of rebirth — visitors to Like Magic at Mass MoCA are invited into Grace Clark’s 'In a new light (Healing Dirt).'
Rembrandt van Rijn's 'Man Reading' sits against the light. Image with permission from the Clark Art Institute.
May 10 2024 @ 10:30 am
Works on Paper invites artists of all experience and skill levels to work closely with thematic selections of drawings from the Clark’s collection.

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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