A short weekend shopping stroll

It seemed West Cornwall’s Mid-Winter Stroll missed winter by one weekend. Compared to the cold weather and snow over the weekend of Feb. 11 and 12, the Mid-Winter Stroll (held in West Cornwall on Saturday, Feb. 18) felt like the first hint of spring. The 50-degree temperatures came across as practically balmy and by the stroll’s start at 3 p.m. the ice sculptures, sponsored by National Iron Bank and Ingersoll Furniture and shaped by the talented hands of Zejke Hermann, had already begun to melt. 

A carving of a fish was slick with droplets. Couples stepped through slushy snow to take photos with their phones before the designs in the ice figures disappeared. 

But the stroll still strolled and the band played on — The Bob Parker Trio brought their drums, keyboard and cello to the Souterrain Gallery, filling the electric lime green gallery with the sounds of slow jazz. 

Above the gallery, in The Wish House (painted a rich pear hue) owner Bianca Langner Griggs was opening bottles of sparkling wine and celebrating the eclectic and colorful home decor and gifts shop’s 20th anniversary. 

“I think it must be insanity!” Langner Griggs laughed when asked what has kept her going while running the small town business for two decades. “Plus my drive and my belief that this is just such a beautiful area, it’s such a bucolic town, and I think it could be so much more. Maybe someday we’ll get there, but I’ll probably be buried then, or in a padded cell. For now, we’re going to keep going until we figure it out.”

On the other end of The Wish House, Kent School student Eleanor Rose was taking a break from academics and had set up a pop-up shop, selling her feline-design T-shirts that read “Cats Against Catcalls.” An hour into the stroll she had sold 15 shirts with customers lining up. 

“I started making these at my old high school in Portland, Ore., and brought along my silk screen when we moved here,” Rose said. Selling each shirt at $25 dollars she explained that she prints them for her school’s feminist club and donates 20 percent of the sales to Planned Parenthood. 

Said one older T-shirt buyer, “I do have a cat at home, although there are not as many catcalls as I once had to worry about.”

A raffle set up by the Cornwall Economic Development Commission kept visitors on the move, collecting stamps on their cards in hopes of winning a wine basket. They stopped by Bain Real Estate, Ingersoll Furniture, Housatonic Hairworks and Cornwall Bridge Pottery, but it was the West Cornwall Library where many stopped to plop down — and get to work. Wherever Joe Brien and his Lost Art Workshops appear, children and adults seem to immediately hunker down in concentrated silence and get to work building and creating. For the stroll he demonstrated how to make a “survival bracelet” made from 8 feet of parachute chord, apparently useful for all sorts of emergencies, from a replacement shoelace to a makeshift splint. 

“The Mid-Winter Stroll is the first public thing we’re really getting behind,” said Janet Carlson, chairman of the Cornwall Economic Development Commission and CEO of the One Eleven Group. “We want to show people what we’ve got here in town and hopefully attract new business.

“We’re working to bring people here, show them what we’ve got here, and help them succeed, as well as supporting the businesses that are already here. I moved to Cornwall after 20 years of living in New York, and it’s such an amazing community that I know if I could do it and love it, other people can too.”