Open co-op!

The Lost River Artisans Co-op and Museum spent the winter moving—and no small task that was! Their new space is a 60-year old building that once housed a marble sink factory and then became a feed store. After being empty for years, the co-op and museum have rented the center section and worked very hard to make it functional, beautiful AND ADA-compliant! The square footage is the same as we had in the old barn, but we now have amenities that old barns do not. YEA! We opened the weekend of April 16, and will be open Saturdays and Sundays, 10 AM until 5 PM, until December.

April 30^th is our GRAND re-Opening! We remain the same co-op and museum we have been since 1996. (The co-op itself actually goes back to 1988.) We’ve simply moved 1.8 miles south along WV State Route 259. The new street address is 8937. There is a big re-Opening sign out front, and it’s a big red building. Outdoor vendor spaces are available for the 30^th at $15; call 304-897-5250 to sign up. (Vendors keep all additional monies.) There are great raffle prizes, a ribbon cutting with the Chamber of Commerce, and great events and fun planned all day—from 10 until 5 PM. Come on out on April 30^th and help us celebrate our new space!

Happy birthday!

Oasis FineArt and Crafts at 103 South Main Street, Harrisonburg, VA, has a different Featured Artist exhibit nearly every month. April focuses on that phenomenon we all know so well: birthdays. I didn’t have much time, but I made a few simple plates to play with the theme.

Birthdays mean so many different things to people. We all know some to whom a birthday is, they claim, “just a number.” To someone else it may be a day of joyful anticipation, although in the predominant American culture that stance is probably popular only among the very young or radically different. Birthdays terrorize some, so they deny them with either outright lies or by helping plastic surgeons send their kids to ivy league schools. They never get away with that for very long, but at maybe it’s the race against time that counts. Other people let birthdays turn them into ossified old fossils, grumpy and disheartened, while others just as old decide to appreciate the time they have and work at staying chipper. My friend Evelyn acknowledges that she has “a hitch in my get-along” (that’s an octogenarian “get-along”), but she refuses to let it get her down when she can be out in her garden or visiting with her family or pets.

Whenever your birthday is, whatever mass of numbers you may have accrued, may it be happy! Take time to celebrate you and every one of those years that you’ve had to grow and do whatever you enjoy doing!