Welcome to the Berkshires Week blog
Hello, Berkshires!
Last Saturday, a brittle cold night, I stood on a sidewalk on Elm Street with a friend, looking in the window of the African Market. He pointed past scales and down aisles of bright cans to a row of orange bottles and said they were palm oil, and a universal ingredient in Ghanaian cooking. Who knew this place lay right around the corner from downtown, next door to a comic book store? And I thought – this is my job.
A bare few weeks ago, I took over Berkshires Week here at the Eagle. So it's now my job to be curious. Anything to see, hear, touch and taste in the county belongs in these pages. And because it's winter, and Berkshires Week too has drawn into a smaller, inside spot, in the Thursday D section of the paper, many things will show up here. Farm stands and drive-in movies, squeezebox festivals and blues and drumming on the green and canoe trips on the Housatonic may all appear in this blog, and daily things too: the first mallard ducks returning, and the morning the first bloodroot blooms.
Barn on Old North Main Street, Lanesboro, courtesy Ethan Zuckerman
The Berkshires are familiar ground. For four years, before it came under the Eagle's fold, I wrote for the Advocate in south county. Then I went away to school. But I left too many things undone, not to come back. I have not yet found the Mohican stone sweat lodges in the south county woods. I haven't hiked to Bash Bish falls, or dug solidified spills of glass out of the slag heap of the old Lenoxdale glass factory, or danced to Mountain Laurel's fiddle.
When I do, I'll let you know. As Melville once wrote to Hawthorne, "this isn't a letter, or even a note — but only a passing word said to you over your garden gate." Talk back any time.