Month: March 2017

Couple more shots from Magnolia Beach the other night…such a peaceful spot!

Pick #1: The Boston Flower Show

This year’s show theme is “Superheroes of the Garden”.  You’ve probably heard of Comic-Con, the huge celebration of comic books, video games and popular culture.  This year’s Flower Show will be a veritable Horti-Con, honoring the crusaders, innovative tools and legendary plants helping to make us all champions in the battle for garden supremacy!

Our gardens are created by landscape designers, garden centers and nurseries, farms, florists, schools, and non-profit organizations to delight attendees and introduce themselves and their services.  Gardens and displays feature dozens of examples of plants, methods and materials to increase the beauty, the bountiful harvest and the ecological friendliness of our gardens and outdoor spaces.  The gardens are judged just prior to the opening of the show by prestigious members of the New England horticultural community and awarded prizes based on creativity, use of plants and materials, color and fragrance, and ecological concepts among other criteria. Awards are posted at each garden. See if you agree!

READ MORE HERE

Pick #2: HONK!

READ MORE AND GET TICKETS HERE

The North Shore Players Youth Theatre proudly presents the musical Honk!

The 18-member cast, ages 7 to 14, sing and dance through this retelling of the Ugly Duckling Story, as the Ugly Duckling struggles for acceptance, while avoiding two hungry Cats.  Honk! is presented at Hogan Regional Auditorium, 450 Maple Street, Danvers.  Performance dates are Friday, March 24 and Saturday, March 25, at 7 p.m., and a matinee on Sunday, March 26, at 2 p.m.

Tickets are:  $18/$15 (student/senior) and can be purchased at the door, through cast members, or below, online with PayPal: ($1 per ticket for service fee):

Pick #3: Healthy Smoothie Class at Whole Foods MarketStreet

Local Fruit Smoothie Competition:

Sign up for a free class at a Whole Foods Market Wellesley! Students learn about healthy eating, and then compete in small group teams to create the best tasting fruit Smoothie, using local fruits, yogurt and 100% juices. Ready… set… buzz that blender.

Reserve your seat on EventBrite  as space is limited, ages 8+. (https://kidscookinggreenmarch.eventbrite.com)

About Kid’s Cooking Green:

Kids Cooking Green offers classes and activities introducing children to the importance of eating locally grown food. Through hands-on cooking, and lively classroom presentation students learn about nutrition and the positive impact eating locally can have on the environment, and their bodies.

Parents, we ask that you also stay at the store for the duration of the class.

As always, for a comprehensive list of family activities, please visit our friends at North Shore Kid

The Sunken Road

From U.S. Park Service:
Introduction
This farm lane served as a breastwork for the Con­federate center. For about three hours 2,200 Confederates, later reinforced by ad­ditional troops, held off the attacks of a combined Union force numbering nearly 10,000. Finally, just after noon, this thin gray line collapsed and fell back several hundred yards to the Piper Farm. The Union attackers had suffered too many casualties to pursue their advantage. Seeing the dead in the road an observer wrote, “They were lying in rows like the ties of a rail­road, in heaps like cordwood mingled with the splintered and shattered fence rails. Words are inadequate to portray the scene.”
A Simple Farm Lane Changed Forever
During the early hours of the battle, Col. John Brown Gordon promised Robert E. Lee: “These men are going to stay here, General, till the sun goes down or victory is won.” The Confederate troops that Gordon commanded were part of a well protected line of over 2,200 men hunkered down behind piled-up fence rails in this well worn sunken road.

When the Federal attacks shifted south at approximately 9:30 a.m., the Confederates held their fire until the last possible second. Then, as Gordon remembered, “My rifles flamed and roared in the Federals’ faces like a blinding blaze of lightning…the entire line, with few exceptions, went down in the consuming blast.”

For more than three hours thousands of men blazed away at each other at point-blank range. Eventually the overwhelming Union numbers and confusion in the Confederate ranks forced the defenders back. When the fighting subsided, 5,500 soldiers lay dead or wounded on the field and in the road. That number included Col. Gordon, who had been hit five different times. After the deadly struggle for this sunken road, soldiers who fought here described it as the “road of death” and a “ghastly flooring.” From that day forward, the road has been known as Bloody Lane.

“Heaps Upon Heaps Were There in Death’s Embrace”
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Love After Love

The time will come
when, with elation
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door, in your own mirror
and each will smile at the other’s welcome,

and say, sit here. Eat.
You will love again the stranger who was your self.
Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart
to itself, to the stranger who has loved you

all your life, whom you ignored
for another, who knows you by heart.
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,

the photographs, the desperate notes,
peel your own image from the mirror.
Sit. Feast on your life.

Derek Walcott (1930 – 2017)

A native of the Caribbean island of St. Lucia, Walcott was one of the most decorated of modern poets and playwrights. A winner of the 1992 Nobel Prize for Literature, he began writing in his teens, attended the University of Jamaica and moved to Trinidad to teach. He was hired by Boston University in 1981 and was awarded a MacArthur Foundation Grant the same year. He later taught at the University of Alberta, (Canada) and the University of Essex, (England). Thrice married, thrice divorced, Walcott had two daughters. He died last week in St. Lucia.

I heard Tom Hiddleston read this on NPR last Sunday and wished my radio had a repeat button.

Greg Bover

news from Joe Ciolino:

Business Owners comprising the Gloucester Downtown Association are looking to hire a new paid coordinator for the 2017 Sidewalk Bazaar.  John Orlando who has done a great job for many years  is now stepping down to concentrate on his own business, The Harbor View Inn . If anyone is interested  in the job, which does pay, please contact  Joe Ciolino (The Weathervane 978-281-1227)  or Patty Gates (Premier Imprints 978-282-3227)to learn more and to meet to discuss the job description.

Thanks,
Joe Ciolino GDA Director

Late morning sunrise on Monday, the first day of Spring.   Took a little extra time for the sun to reach it’s way over the low cloud bank.

Which one speaks to you?