The season for foraged foods has come to an end just as the first fresh produce is stretching out in backyard gardens. It’s the peas that come first, tender little shoots that peek out from clover-like leaves and cling with skinny tendrils to any kind of stick or frame you stick in the dirt beside them. I’d never grown peas before, but this year Chris Janelli of Salisbury dropped off an envelope full of seeds from his own garden, along with a note that said, “Peas in the ground now! NOW!” This was a couple weeks ago. I followed his extremely subtle instructions and have been rewarded with a couple dozen totally cute little plants that are throwing off tender little pods.Peas are really healthy for your garden, and a great first plant. They enrich your soil and put in a lot of nitrogen, which is a kind of natural fertilizer. My arugula will be super happy when it takes the place of those peas in a few weeks.Baby green peas are also good for your body, which I guess makes sense. I continue to be surprised by this, but they have loads of omega-6 fatty acids. How can this be when they seem so fat-free? Well, that’s nature for you, always full of surprises.Peas are also full of fiber (not as much of a surprise) and they’re low in unhealthy fats. There are studies being done now that show that even a cup of peas a day can provide superhero-strong levels of something called coumestrol, which is believed to help fight off stomach cancer.The other greens that are shooting up with mad vigor in people’s gardens now are mint (I have a bunch of this) and garlic (which I continually fail to grow — advice from garlic growers is welcome). All the other gardeners I know are happily pulling up little scallion-shaped bulbs at the base of slender, tender garlic greens. They don’t differentiate into tiny cloves until later in the summer. And they haven’t developed their garlicky bite yet; one website described young garlic as peppy, not pungent. Garlic is famously healthy and helps fight everything from cancer to heart disease to infections. It helps keep bugs such as ticks off your body. There are also studies being done now that suggest garlic can help keep your body from developing too many fat cells. Apparently, there is a school of thought that obesity is a form of chronic inflammation. Garlic helps fight the specific types of inflammation that cause your weight to balloon. Maybe.One thing that does seem to be clear is that garlic’s health benefits increase if you let your chopped cloves sit for a little while before you eat them. Cooking lowers the cancer-fighting properties of your garlic, as does the addition of acids such as lemon juice.This Italian-inspired summer salad tastes best if you let it sit in garlicky splendor for a half hour or so before you serve it. If you want to protect the health benefits of the garlic, add the lemon juice and vinegar only about 10 minutes before serving. This also seems to help keep the bread intact.Insalata povera (Poor salad)Serves four as a side dish3 cups stale, very dense bread; 1 stalk and bulb of young garlic, chopped (or one large garlic clove, minced); four stalks of fresh mint, chopped (get rid of the stems first); 1/2 cup julienned fresh, crunchy little green peas, in their pods; 1/4 cup celery, chopped fine; if any of your other herbs are looking at you invitingly from the garden beds, bring them in too, but don’t let them overwhelm your salad; 1/2 cup good olive oil; a couple squeezes of fresh lemon juice; 1 tablespoon of a nice mellow vinegar; coarse salt (this salad really absorbs the salt, don’t be shy); fresh pepper to tasteSo, no kidding, the bread for this salad really needs to be super dense or you’ll end up with glop. I also roasted my dense, stale bread for 10 minutes in a 350 oven, to give it even more backbone; the unintended consequence was that I got nice toasty bread edges, which upgraded the flavor of this salad, IMHO.*Soak your stale, dense bread in warm water for about five minutes or less, until it softens. Squeeze out the excess water. Break it up into big pieces and then toss it in a big bowl with the other ingredients (except the acids, if you want to protect the nutrients in your garlic). Taste. Adjust the seasonings. Then leave it alone for a half hour or so; add the lemon juice and vinegar about 10 minutes before you serve.* IMHO is the text message abbreviation for In My Honest Opinion.
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Meg Sher, executive director of the David M. Hunt Library in Falls Village.
“I was a library kid. I walked to the library after school,” she said.
For Sher, the library is as much about the people as it about the books.
“Part of the job I love so much is that running the library is such a community,” she said.
She treasures the relationships she has built, whether recommending books, celebrating accomplishments or helping patrons through difficult times.
“I am thankful that our community is so supportive of the library, unlike what is happening in some other places where librarians are villainized,” Sher said.
Sher takes pride in the Hunt Library’s reputation for being “open and welcoming to everyone. People come in and see things and get pulled into things they weren’t expecting. Our library is seen as a positive force.”
Sher came to Falls Village after being awarded a fellowship at Adamah Farm, then a program of the Isabella Freedman Jewish Retreat Center. She worked at pickling, in the greenhouse and later in the development office. She also worked as a nanny.
At the same time, “I was in the library all the time,” she recalled. “I’m a voracious reader. The library is where I met a lot of my first friends in Falls Village.”
She became assistant librarian at Hunt and worked in that position for almost a decade before becoming the executive director four years ago.
Meg Sher, executive director of the David M. Hunt Library in Falls Village.L. Tomaino
Sher met her husband, Adam, while working at Adamah. They had their wedding there in 2012. He now emcees many events which she co-organizes with the Falls Village Recreation Commission.
Sher and her family live near the library.
“It’s an easy commute,” she said with a smile. “My kids run back and forth. I can go home to walk the dog if I need to.”
“My kids have grown up here.” Her oldest son, Eli, “loves volunteering. He helps with Augustfest and often helps set up chairs for ArtWall gatherings.” Her younger son, Noah, is often at events and was eager to taste cookies at last year’s holiday cookie swap.
When she is not at the library, Sher likes to hike with her family. Bella, their Portuguese water dog, often accompanies them.
Sher enjoys seeking out people to offer events at the library.
“I do a lot of different community programming. It is one of my favorite parts of the job.”
Augustfest, featuring food, music and an auction, is the library’s biggest fundraiser.
“This summer we had a record 152 attendees, which was pretty incredible.”
Yonah Sadeh, a filmmaker from Falls Village, inaugurated the VideoWall this year, Sher explained.
“I’ve known Yonah since he was two. It’s wonderful to work with him as an adult.”
The VideoWall complements the library’s ArtWall, which showcases a new artist each month. Sher praised the ArtWall committee for its work and highlighted December’s popular “12x12 Show,” featuring works by local artists, each measuring 12 by 12 inches and priced at $150.
Sher added that some of the artists who exhibit at the ArtWall offer workshops to students at Kellogg School, next door to the library. In September, artist Danielle Mailer worked with the children. Vincent Inconiglios taught a class last November.
Being next to the school, said Sher, is a great advantage.
“Kids are coming after school, to see friends, work on projects, find a great book. Kids that love the library end up using the library as grownups.”
This past year, in partnership with Adamah, the library and school created a garden, with excess produce made available at The Center on Main.
This year is Sher’s second year participating in the Troutbeck Symposium in Amenia with James King, director of the library at Salisbury School. The Troutbeck Symposium is “a gathering of a year of student historical inquiry across the region” in which students “uncover stories that have been overlooked, forgotten, or never recorded.”
Last year, Sher and King began a project with a group of students researching Irish immigrants in Falls Village, exploring ancestry and creating small magazines about their findings.
They continued this year, visiting St. Patrick’s Catholic Cemetery on Dublin Road, cleaning seven gravestones and even righting one with the help of stonemason and gravestone restoration expert Karl Munson. Paul Kozeazny, a representative of the Catholic archdiocese, helped secure access to the site.
A film documenting their activities will be shown at the symposium in spring 2027.
A full schedule of programs and events, ranging from tech help to ceramic mug-making, can be found on the library’s website.
Despite spending her days surrounded by books, and a busy schedule of programming, Sher still loves to settle in with a book at home.
For more information on library programs and events, visit huntlibrary.org
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Touré was born in northern Mali in 1981. His father, the renowned guitarist Ali Farka Touré, came from a family of soldiers and wanted his son to join the army. The younger Touré studied drums and the calabash and practiced guitar in secret. He earned his father’s blessing to pursue music shortly before Ali died in 2006, and they played two tracks together on Vieux’s debut album.
Touré is known for his deft, polyrhythmic playing, and his songs grow out of riffs that repeat and layer to hypnotic effect. He draws on rock, blues, Latin music and various African traditions. This distinctive blend builds on his father’s work adapting the sonic traditions of Mali’s arid north to the guitar.
Vieux’s album “Mon Pays” (“My Country,” 2013) honored Mali’s culture after Tuareg separatists and extremist groups seized the north in 2012. “Samba” (2017) was recorded before about 50 listeners in Woodstock, New York. In 2022 came “Les Racines” (“The Roots”), a return to his father’s desert blues, and “Ali,” on which he and the trio Khruangbin reworked eight of the elder Touré’s songs.
Touré leads the Ali Farka Touré Foundation, which focuses on cultural and educational work in Mali. Around the anniversary of Ali’s death, it holds a festival in Bamako, Mali’s capital. Bamako has been under blockade for much of the past year, besieged by JNIM, an al-Qaeda affiliate. Against this backdrop, Touré continues to carry the music of Mali to audiences abroad.
At the Nov. 5 concert, Touré’s desert blues will share the bill with Gnawa, the music LanGus plays, which developed in Morocco among West Africans who were brought north across the desert as enslaved people. Gnawa is religious music traditionally performed at all-night healing ceremonies called lila, intended to carry participants into trance.
Samir LanGusProvided
LanGus was born and raised outside Agadir, Morocco, and began learning Gnawa from its masters at age 8. He plays the sintir, a three-stringed bass lute made of wood and camel skin. The player strikes a low string with the thumb to create a deep, resonant pulse. Iron castanets clatter over the sintir’s bass line, and vocalists trade call-and-response refrains.
LanGus infuses the tradition with jazz and improvisation. In New York, he founded the ensemble Innov Gnawa. His first solo album, “Gnawa Love,” came out in February.
Touré and LanGus’s Nov. 5 concert is one of the last public events at Race Brook Lodge, which is for sale and ended full-service operations at the end of 2025. The lodge’s final scheduled event, on Nov. 6, is an evening of Rumi’s poetry with translator and vocalist Haleh Liza Gafori, cellist Isabel Castellvi and ceremonial bard James Bird.
For tickets, visit rblodge.com.
James FitzGerald is a student at Yale Law School, where he focuses on ecological restoration and international environmental cooperation. He splits his time between Lakeville and New Haven.
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