By the way

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.)

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Once, I got invited to a musical potluck in mid-New Hampshire. Thirty or forty fiddlers, whistlers, banjo pickers and players of mandolins, guitars, pianos and standing basses sat on a warm, red rug, playing reels — one would start and others would listen and follow, and the tunes ran around the room. They had a long table full of casseroles and desserts; one made with whipped cream and cranberries in a sweet crust I'll never forget. They had a log cabin halfway up the hill, a moonlit stumble through the woods, that a wood stove heated into a sauna. And they sold eggs new laid that day.

I got a dozen for two dollar as I left, and I have never had anything like them. The yolks were rounded and deep orange. They cooked up firmer than store bought eggs; they looked and tasted brighter. It's the season to celebrate eggs now. Many traditions recognize them as spring food, food for the start of the growing season. It's the season to celebrate what's young and quick and new too, and the first red buds on the trees.

Spring chickens at Taft Farm, Eagle file photo.

So here's a toast to chickens — warm buff chickens and tall leghorns, irridescent green chickens and coppery hens with red combs, and roosters with feathered ankles like bellbottoms. And here's another to fresh eggs. I set out this afternoon to find out where I can find eggs from the farm around here. There are still farms here that grow them.

At the north and south ends of the county, there are a range of choices. Taft Farms in Great Barrington raises chickens in its clover fields. Caretaker Farm lets its chickens range free. In mid-county, try Otis Poultry Farms, or hang out by the poultry barn at Hancock Shaker Village and listen to the roosters crow.

And if you feel a need for more young life in the early spring, you can always rescue a rabbit.

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