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.

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.)

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.

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.

Robert D. Kaplan does that. And he knows what he's looking at. He has been reporting on difficult, dangerous and developing places for more than twenty years. He began as a freelancer, covering the Iraq war in the 1980's, and since then he has written for The New York Times, , and others, published seven books, and influenced two U.S. presidents. And he will be speaking at the Stockbridge Library this Sunday at 4 p.m..

He will talk about his latest book: Hog Pilots, Blue Water Grunts: The American Military in the Air, at Sea, and on the Ground, published in September 2007 by Random House. He has spent months travelling with small U.S. military units in farflung places, and here he gives an inside view of the navy and the marines and their varied assignments abroad.

Kaplan asks hard questions about the way countries develop — and the way they hold onto moderation and dignity, or lose it. In Waterworld he writes about Bangaladesh:"squeezed into an Iowa-sized territory—20 to 60 percent of which floods every year—is a population half the size of that in the United States and larger than the one in Russia."

Like many developing countries, he argues, Bangaladesh is torn between the competing pressures of its own non-government organizations, reclaiming land tree by tree, and foreign aid, and fundamentalist extremists. His articles have raised hot debate. Agree or disagree, but one impression remains clear: that he speaks with respect of the people who live there, in the monsoon rains, and know what it feels like.

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.