Barack Obama, coming into the White House today, faces one set of threats, and Martin Luther King, turning depression into determination on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, faced another. They are different men. They have different dreams.

If they could walk around the city together today, talking quietly on the frozen sidewalks, I don't know whether they would agree with each other. I don't know whether they would like each other. Martin Luther King was a brilliant firebrand from a highly religious family, and Obama has become the spokesman of a young generation deeply aware of the dangers of fundamentalism.

But surely they would respect each other. Obama has proved King's words true. He has been judged not on the color of his skin but on the content of his character. When the election results were firmly announced, one of my friends turned to another and said, "this is so cool. Your son will grow up knowing that black men and women run things." In 1960, it was a vision. For children born today, it will be the way things are.

As Professor Charles Ogletree told John Stewart, there's a long way to go yet. Toni Morrison wrote that in daily use, when someone mentions a man or woman, everyone knows that the man or woman is white -- because no one says so. We assume it unless the writer specifically tells us otherwise. I hope that one day, when I write about men or women, any reader will assume only that they are human.

As a way to start: here are ways to spend a week celebrating Martin Luther King Day, and also to celebrate Barack Obama's inauguration. One day is not enough.

Thursday, Friday, Saturday and Sunday, Time & Space Limited will screen “Faat-Kine,” a tribute to the everyday heroism of African women, in French and Wolof with English subtitles, 7:30 p.m., 434 Columbia St., Hudson, N.Y., (518) 822-8448 or www.timeandspace.org.

On Saturday at 2 p.m., David Grover and Friends will lead a freedom concert and sing-a-long at Berkshire South Regional Community Center at 5 Crissey Road, Great Barrington. Tickets are $10 for adults and $5 for children 2-12, free to children under 2 years old.  For more information, call (413) 528-2810.

On Monday, the Berkshire Museum celebrates from 1 to 4 p.m. with readings from King’s “I Have a Dream” speech. Admission to the museum is free all day.

MCLA will begin its 15th annual Martin Luther King Day celebration with coffee and pastries at 10 a.m. Music and speeches follow, and Williamstown residents Donna Denelli-Hess and Deborah Foss will receive the Peacemaker award for their volunteer work at a Kenyan orphanage for HIV-infected children. The celebration is free and ends with a community lunch. (413) 663-7588.

On Tuesday, the Mahaiwe Performing Arts Center will broadcast Barack Obama’s inauguration as a free community experience, 11 a.m., 14 Castle St., Great Barrington, (413) 528-0100.

Thursday, Jan. 22, at Hildene, Scott Bongartz, Hildene’s executive diretor, will begin the winter history series with a talk about “Lincoln the Leader” and five key decisions Lincoln made during his presidency.

A green-living festival tree.

Eagle file

On the second Day of Christmas, my true love gave to me...

Two fuzzy mittens (for a hike at Notchview)
Three Yule logs (made of chocolate)
Four marionettes

Five minute's rest!

Six Carol singers (Tomorrow at 7 p.m. at the South Congregational Church at 110 South St., Pittsfield.)
Seven Kwaanza candles
Eight Actors playing
Nine artists crafting
Eleven Ringers ringing
12 children skating (with the Pittsfield Parks Speed Skating Club, 11:45 a.m.-12:45 p.m. through Wednesday, Pittsfield Boys’ and Girls’ Club, Melville Street. Ages 5 and up. www.pittsfieldspeedskating.org. (413) 442-6407.)

And a week off with my family!
Happy holidays all.

I once sat on on a rehearsal for the Fall Festival of Plays at Shakespeare & Company. High school actors from sixteen schools or more gatherd in one gymnasium to practice fight choreography. They lept, somersaulted, caught each other in trust falls, and told me breathlessly how long they had waited to be there. The energy in that room was terrific.

The casts had come through late nights together and tech runs together. It's easier when you're 18, but sometimes still lack of sleep will bring on a kind of glee, espcially one that comes from work — or people — worth sweating for. Like getting up at 5 a.m. on Thanksgiving morning to put the 29-pound turkey in the oven, so it will cook before dinner.

Thanksgiving is its own holiday. Large, warm and brief. It gets overshadowed too often by the manic days of December, but I would rather enjoy it on its own. There's plenty going on.

This weekend in North Adams, in a Mill City production at Western Heritage Gateway State Park, The Little Prince looks for a way into space. He leaves his pilot in the Sahara with a promise of warmth in the empty landscape: "It will be as though I had given you, in place of stars, crowds of laughing sleigh bells."

On Monday afternoon at 4, Sandra Thomas, the executive director of Images Cinema, will talk about the independent film movement and its effect on Hollywood.

And on Tuesday, the Colonial will show "Casablanca." I'm told that in the '60s, one of the independent cinemas in Cambridge, Mass. used to show Bogie every year during final exams. The students would come with bottles of champagne and raise a toast.

In 13th century China, firework makers were craftsmen. I don't know whether they created spears or full-sized flying dragons out of light, like Gandalf, but imagine shaping fire with your hands! It sounds magic enough to me. And they did create flowers — peonies and chrysanthemums and willow, and horse tails, and glittering fish.

Once in a Chemistry class, the professor handed out metal spatulas and different powders, and we dipped spoonfuls of powder and held them in the flame of a bunsen burner. The flame changed color with each chemical — mint green, brandy flame blue. Magnesium made it suddenly spit silver, and I suddenly knew how sparklers are made. We used to light them on the back terrace at my grandmother's, on the fourth of July, and run in wide loops around the lawn, watching them fizz.

Here are some larger light displays and celebrations to look forward to over the holiday:

Fireworks
North Adams, Noel Field Athletic Complex. Begins a half hour after conclusion of SteepleCats game. (413) 664-6180.
Fourth of July Celebration
Family events all day and fireworks at dark. Willow park, off route 7 north, Bennington Vt.
July Fourth Family Fest
Fireworks, Skeeter Creek Band, 3 to 11 p.m. Kiddie rides, magician, climbing wall, hay maze, food and family fun. Parking free. Columbia County Fairgrounds, Route 66, Chatham, N.Y. www.columbiafair/otherevents.com. (518) 392-2121. Fireworks, Little League Field, Payn Avenue, Chatham, N.Y.
Pittsfield Fourth of July Parade
One of the largest Independence Day parades in New England. Dozens of marching bands, floats and giant balloons, attracting over 80,000 people each year. 10 a.m. www.pittsfieldparade.com.
Declaration of Independence
Actors from the Williamstown Theatre Festival read the Declaration of Independence and the British Reply outside WCMA following the Williamstown Parade. Founding Documents of the United States of America on view in Manifestos: American Dreams and Their Founding Documents.

Dalton Fair comes to town June 4-8. Eagle file photo.

This weekend, in honor of Memorial Day. my brother and sister and I and my oldest friends spent time at a family place, walking in the woods and playing cards by kerosene lamp. We pulled objects from twenty years of tide walking and flea markets off the shelves and looked at them. Mussel shells, drift wood, binoculars with metal eye pieces.

On the third day, sitting sleepily on the steps of a used bookstore, I thought how restful this small holiday had been. But then, how long does a holiday have to be, to be a holiday? How about an evening outdoors, with picnic sandwiches and drummers on the lawn. Or a lunch with a friend in a place you haven't seen in years. After all, the county is turning into a place people come to, and we are already here. So I hope that that summer listing of events will encourage many holidays, for all of us who live in the mountains.

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.

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.

Before the cold weather breaks, warm reading evenings are springing up. Robert Campanile and Milne Library will present Caligula by Albert Camus at the Williams Inn, this Friday at 7 p.m. Caligula, the lunatic Roman emperor who made his horse a magistrate, makes a grim central character — Camus wrote the play in 1938 and saw it performed at the end of World War II, in a time full of political fanatics. But he concludes that a man cannot cut himself off from humanity without going mad.

For a funnier evening, Matt Tannenbaum at the Bookstore will read humorous stories from Dorothy Parker and others, March 19 at Colorful Stitches in Lenox, at 7:30 p.m. Listeners and knitters are welcome. An evening with the wit and critic who wrote

Oh, life is a glorious cycle of song,
A medley of extemporanea;
And love is a thing that can never go wrong;
And I am Marie of Romania

will surely be a lively one.

The season is changing — and corn muffins with maple butter are coming back. Farms across the county are maple sugaring, and many welcome visitors. Ioka Valley Farm has opened its maple breakfast. From now until April, all through sugaring season, they serve their own maple syrup and maple butter on pancakes and muffins. If they're full when you come, wait a few minutes in the barn across the way and watch the syrup in the making.

This Saturday, Hopkins Forest and the Williamstown Rural Lands Foundation at Sheep Hill will get together for a comprehensive maple festival. Explore the forest's sugaring shack in the morning, 11 a.m. to 2 p.m.; taste fresh syrup on pancakes and icecream and syrup candy cooled on snow, and walk in the woods. College musicians have been known to walk them too, with fiddle and whistle and drum. From 4 to 7 p.m., come to Sheep Hill for crafts and bread making and a maple banquet.

People have bunged holes in sugar maples here for centuries, and in other trees too. Many kinds of trees have sweetish sap; box elder makes a clearer and paler sugar, and birch makes a syrup with a wintergeen flavor. But here, above all, we have maple trees. Walk or snowshoe among them and hear their stories — Tall Tales of Tall Trees — this Saturday at McLennan reservation in Tyringham, with Trustees of Reservations, from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m.

Berkshire Grown will throw their annual maple dinner next week too, Wednesday March 12, at Spice Restaurant on North Street in Pittsfield, with music at 6 p.m. and dinner at 7 p.m. The harvest season is beginning.

The trees are waking. We are celebrating, some with plans and events, and some without. It doesn't take a party; it only takes a phone call, or a whim, or a walk in the woods. Hopkins Forest and Ioka Valley are open any time the kettle is boiling. Many others are filling their sap buckets too. Come on out and join in.

Since I moved back to the Berkshires, I keep finding ways it has expanded, as I keep refinding its essential flavor. 500 years ago these mountains were seasonal lands for the people who lived south in the Hudson valley. (Does that sound familiar?) People have come and gone and come again here for a long time. And new people have come, and the place has changed and grown.

We celebrate the growth. Pittsfield will hold its fifth annual Immigrants' Day Friday, Feb. 29, with dancing and food and art and services. And the Cantilena Choir will sing next week, March 8, a collage of the journeys of people who came to this country in 1910 and 1921. These people spoke to the guards at Ellis Island and recorded their stories, the family they found and lost, the shoes they would not wear until they set foot in New York.

Have you heard of Berkshire Publishing in Great Barrington? Somehow, I hadn't until I found their blog today. Along with a guide to computer and human interactions, and a newsletter on current events in China, they have a unique history of the United States. It's a history from the outside: a guide to what other countries think of us.

Imagine what a history of the United States would sound like, if everyone wrote it. Let Navajo writers tell the stories the southwest, and Russian writers contribute their trade routes with Alaska in the 1400's, and the space race. Let Phyllis Wheatley write her real impressions of New England. Let slaves and small farmers and Scots and cajuns speak of the deep south. I am continually stumbling on stories and people that are part of this country, that no one told me about in school. Doctors gave up their practices to vaccinate the plains nations against smallpox. When horses came to the midwest, the Comanche became the best light cavalry in the world within 50 years.

This Berkshire Publishing project makes me curious, about more than the past — about the present. They are offering to tell me just how good a place this country has among other nations. I wonder what Canada thinks; like the neighbors I've just moved next to, it keeps to itself. But they've lived on my street loger than I have.