By the way

The town is spring cleaning. Picnic tables have sprung up around the ice cream stands. (Who invented the picnic table? That sturdy A-frame defines camp grounds and outdoor sandwiches on crumpled napkins, but there must have been a time when it didn't exist. There must have been a time when campgrounds didn't exist.) Street sweepers are out, and drain cleaners, and shirtless men walk on flat rooftops checking for leaks. Beds of earth are turned over beside the sidewalks.

The parks are spring cleaning too. Great Barrington's Riverwalk held its first cleanup day last weekend, and Berkshire Sanctuaries in Lenox invites volunteers to put on gloves and clear its trails, from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m.

Cleaning the Housatonic River, Eagle file.

Whether you take clippers along or not, these mild days are good to be out in. And as the nights get longer and warmer, another mark of the season appears: lights. My neighbors stoke up their cinder block grill with wood kindling, and I can see the embers glow. Walking home a week ago, I saw a string of small lights lining stairs and railings. Candles, I thought, and wondered why — were they devotional, or a remembrance, a reverse Halloween or a sign of Passover, a gift to travellers?

Maybe all of the above. Close up, I saw they were electric, but they are a sign of warmer weather. They are a sign that not long from now, I will be able to stretch out on the deck, with a lamp burning on the rail, and listen for bats.

Posted by Katherine Abbott at 6:20 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Have you ever played with music?

You're sitting with a group of people, maybe on steps, maybe on a summer night. Someone picks up a fiddle and plays one note. An open string, an easy rhythm. Someone strums chords. Someone takes off their shoes and starts banging a beat with them. Someone takes that note and throws in a run of notes, dashing up from that one. And you have a dance. You have music swinging from one pair of hands to the next, fumbling and free.

In college, in a rough semester, I fell into a contradance band. This is music for back porches and long afternoons. It's music anyone can pick up. I play the recorder, that simple whistle kids learn in fifth grade, and playing like this, with other people, taught me to love it. The music made me high. I could walk up and take hold of it with both hands.

Eric Buddington and Elena Traister kick off an impromptu rehearsal in a North Adams Coffee Shop.

This week and next are good ones for improvisational music in the Berkshires. Ed Mann, percussionist for Frank Zappa for 10 years, will perform this Saturday, April 12, at 4 p.m. at Berkshire Music School to raise funds for the school's drum equipment. Mann played with Zappa's band, Mothers of Invention — an intensive training ground for complex rhythms and quick changes. He will perform with Fran Curley on drums, Charlie Tokarz on winds, and Dave Christopolís on bass. Tickets are $25; order ahead at (413) 442-1411.

And this weekend and next week, The Williamstown Jazz Festival brings concerts to the college and the town and north county arts museums. Pianist Gabriela Montero will perform on Wednesday at 8 p.m. at the Clark — half an evening of classics, and half music created on the spot, based on themes or pieces the audience suggests. For more information, visit www.williamstownjazz.com or call the concert hotline at (413) 597-3146.

Posted by Katherine Abbott at 7:22 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

People, cattle, chickens flocked on green hilltops, cleared for town greens and fields. Teams of horses came up the dirt roads. Families collected sap buckets. I was looking at warm, crowded paintings of farm life filling town centers with friendly bustle. I turned over a book and read on the back cover: Grandma Moses was still painting in 1950.

Standing in the Bennington Museum shop, I felt the way I had when I cleaned a closet at my grandparents' farm and found newspaper headlines my parents had saved from Martin Luther King Jr.'s assassination, tanks into Czechoslovakia, the moon landing. I knew these events from text books, and here they were in headlines to be read over morning coffee.

I knew Grandma Moses from book covers too — small bright villages and small bright people. I didn't know she was painting when my parents were born. I didn't know she was painting farm scenes when the state paved the road past my grandparents' farm, and tractors replaced the horse teams. I didn't know she was painting them while New England farming was vanishing around her.

She was an economical farm widow from Hoosick Falls, when she hung a few paintings in the corner pharmacy, by the homemade jam. A New York Art collector, Louis Caldor, happened on them — and got them shown in the Museum of Modern Art. Gives you something to think about next time you walk by a ceramics display at Wild Oats, or a wall of paintings at Bagels Too.

William Kentridge, Learning the Flute, on dislpay at WCMA through April 27.

Grandma Moses painted for Eisenhower and corresponded with Churchill. She listened to Harry Truman play the piano. Two years ago, she wound up in the Baseball Hall of Fame. And she was painting these hills. Her scenes are busy and familiar, muddy and garrolous, and if you want reminding how warm this landscape can be, you can do worse on a damp afternoon than head down to the Bennington Museum to look at them. It has the largest public collection of her paintings in the world.

It's easy to forget how many ongoing and unique exhibits and beautiful things there are to see here. For a complete Exhibits, check the Berkshires Week home page. (I owe Peter McLaughlin's Eagle article from March 2003 for some of the background information here.)

Posted by Katherine Abbott at 8:22 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)