99
North Main
Rochester, VT 05767
(802) 767-9670
BigTown BigTent 2010 Performances each evening. Click here for all the details on this year's performances schedule which includes the following events:
Saturday, July 31 -Etran Finatawa |
photo by Jamie Richardson Articles: |
A Blackberry Story - June 1996
It had been a rainy June that year, too, and I couldn't imagine what I had done by moving myself here. I despaired that the brook behind the house, with its crashing boulders, was way too loud; that everything was soggy, limp, and molding; that the lowering clouds perpetually cloaked the valley. One day I gathered what must have been an expeditionary force of invading wild chervil and arranged it hopefully on the kitchen table. I tried to admire the spare color of the flower, the bright ambiance I told myself it created in the room, and settled into the domestic attentions of what I thought a country life should hold.
But on an exploratory walk, alone, late that August, I came across a huge patch of blackberries fairly bursting with late summer ripeness, and was stopped, almost breathless, at the bounty I found surrounding me. I fashioned a rude container of birch skin and, gathering in as many of the plump berries as it would hold, went straight home and baked a pie. And in that moment of discovered purpose, I found my connection to this place that had been so wild and foreign to me.
Since then, in my travels through this valley and the adjoining countryside, slowly discovering the bounty and joys of country life, I have fashioned many a container for ideas and inspirations. I now feel myself enacting a personally transformative journey of the sort I find described by a Robert Frost poem. It has gradually dawned on me that, during my decade or so here, I have never once thought of living anywhere else - or of a road not taken. Each year, my conviction that this is indeed a town for the arts is reinforced both by the overwhelming support and by a recognition of the number of terrifically talented people that live within a modest distance. For me, it's like going blackberry picking?- coming upon them by surprise, then bringing them home; you find more in the depths of these old mountains, and in this quiet community, than just the blackberries you gather.
Perhaps if it had not rained quite so relentlessly, or if those blackberries had not been quite so plump and rampant, or if I had not stumbled into their cathedral that August - perhaps, I would not have had the courage to stay in Rochester. Now, here, thirteen years later, BigTown Gallery offers its first BigTent Poetry and Music Festival, an idea born this worrisome late winter. The recent stagnant economics remind me of the black and cloudy cloak of that rainy summer a dozen years ago. A walk in these uncertain times must surely be toward a continued discovery of the sanctuary of community, and of a renewed recognition of its inexhaustible gifts.
Of course, this will be a fabulous blackberry year.
Anni Mackay
BigTown Gallery