Tonight, on my cable TV show Let's Talk, I am interviewing Mary Ellen Jepsen, Chair of the Board of Trustees of the Buckland Library, about the new addition which is scheduled to open next week. This is a happy day for me because I served as librarian when the building process began in 2004. And it is a happy day for the town which finally has an ADA compliant library that also has much needed room for the…
Some events are not just for one day. The wonderful art exhibit at Mead Art Museum on the Amherst College campus, will run until May 29. There is no admission charge and the Mead is open from 9 am til midnight! There is no excuse for Amherst students to not get their art assignments done. Closed Mondays, and closed at 5 pm on Friday and Saturday. I guess those students need a little time for social life. Orra…
My friend Kathryn Galbraith and I met inNew York City more than 30 years ago when we were both taking a writing class at the New School. She was working on her first novel for children, Come Spring, about Rennie, a little girl who is moving (again) to a new house, not just an apartment, and looking to put down roots. Kathryn has a special insight and understanding of the hearts of children, and this is a tender…
It rained heavily all Monday night and continued lightly through the morning. Then the temperatures plummeted to 24 degrees. When I went out to my car at 11 am it was covered with ice, and all the locks and doors were frozen tight. I wasn't going anywhere. At 3 pm the sun began to shine brilliantly. It turned the trees and shrubs into crystal sculptures. Happily, even though the temperatures were still in the low 20s, the ice…
Sawyer Hall is our Heath Post Office, Police Office, and Town Library with Town Offices for the Selectbord, Administrator, Tax Collector, Assessors, etc. upstairs, but for for many years a good portion of Sawyer Hall was used by the Grange for suppers, and even for dramatic productions. I remember when we moved here in 1979 the Library was closed because the building was being renovated. Someone gave me a tour of the large open upstairs where a small…
The days are longer and the sun is brighter, so even though snow lies deep on the ground we know that spring is coming. That means that the annual Master Gardeners Spring Symposium held on Saturday, March 19 at Frontier Regional High School is coming up, too.. This year I am presenting a slide show of Elsa Bakalar’s perennial gardens in all their glory. Elsa passed away last year, but her memory remains green for many of us.…
Recently I was able to find a used copy of Constance Spry's book Flower Decoration which includes a few black and white photos of her arrangements. Actually, she did not use the word arrangements, but decorations. If you look really closely at the decoration on the cover of this book you can see that it includes fruits, seed heads, and grasses in an almost invisible vase. I suspect this is not one of her own arrangements by a painting…
Joule Unlimited is a biotechnology company in Cambridge, Massachusetts. It "produces clean, infrastructure-compatible fuels directly from sunlight and waste CO2 in a single-step, continuous process that requires no costly biomass intermediates, processing or dependency on precious natural resources." I become more fascinated by some new technologies at the same rate I become afraid of other energy technologies like 'hydrofraking.' We need to look at the implications of the whole system and hydrofraking puts our water supply at risk.…
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Cold moon, cold moonlight Tucking another blanket around the newborn. by CarolPurington from Family Farm: Haiku for a Place of Moons We have no newborn, but this haiku captures the way I feel as the winter night falls. When bedtime arrives I gaze out at our snowy landscape, chill and luminous in the moonlight; I am happy to slip between my flannel sheets, and tuck a warm quilt around me. Then I dream of spring when the snow…