PETERBOROUGH COMMUNITY CENTER
Peterborough, NH
A New England Summer
When people ask me where I am from, I often say New Hampshire even though I have only lived there for one year of my life. I grew up with grandparents and cousins in New Hampshire. My parents were raised there and moved back when my brother and I were grown. It is a quirky and magical state. So when Melissa Stephenson, a beekeeper from Peterborough, emailed excitedly about bringing The Good of the Hive, it was a pretty easy sell for me. Plus, I thought, how awesome to go to New England in the summer! Well, it ended up being hotter than you-know-what that summer! The wall we chose was in full sun morning to night, but despite the heat, this was a really special experience for me.
The Community
We had a community dinner, I did various speaking engagements around town and we even threw the first-ever World Bees Concert. It is a dream of mine to get people dancing and singing with (and for) the bees. Maeko, an artist from Boston, had reached out to me the year before because he was recording an album of songs about the hive as a metaphor for life. He and his band called Winona and the Riders came and performed on National Honey Bee Day! (I couldn’t make this stuff up if I tried!) Wild Eyes Band, an amazing trio out of Nashville happened to have a cancelation and jumped in as well. I fully plan to expand on this idea in the future and create a series of small concerts around conservation and environmental issues. This was a beautiful beginning. My philosophy is that if we are going to have to work hard to repair the environment, we are going to need to do a lot of dancing.
