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Eastham Public Library

    SMASH HIT

    When Jigglypuff, Pikachu, and Kirby Show Up on Saturdays at the Library

    Game tournaments open to players of all levels can mean losing to a 7-year-old

    By

    EASTHAM — It’s the first round, and I’m already getting bodied by a little kid in a Minecraft shirt. Seven-year-old Wesley Spoor jumps out of his chair, laughing hard, his baby-blue sneakers squealing against the polished floor. The last time I heard sounds like that I was playing basketball in elementary school. Today it’s something totally different.

    We’re playing Super Smash Brothers Ultimate at a Saturday afternoon tournament at the Eastham Public Library. Smash Brothers is a 2018 video game that pits Nintendo characters including Mario, Donkey Kong, and Pikachu against each other in fast-paced, skill-testing combat. He’s Kirby — a round, pink character known for being cute and cheerful and also for being able to inhale things and spit them out as projectiles — and he’s winning.

    Finalists Wesley Spoor, left, and Jay Ramsden flex their thumbs in an epic competition for honor, glory, and bragging rights at the Smash tournament in Eastham on Sept. 14. (Photos by Parker Mumford)

    Wesley, who is from Eastham, is a regular at the tournaments organized by librarian Corey Farrenkopf. He’s here with his grandfather, who watches calmly from the back of the room as his grandson’s avatar kicks, punches, and chomps its way to the top again and again.

    Farrenkopf is no stranger to the game, but when he picks up a controller, he struggles to squeak out a win here. The only real competition for Wesley is 12-year-old Jay Ramsden. Even though he lives in Clinton, Jay is another regular at the tournaments. Jay and Wesley consistently end up in the finals. When Jay contends that Wesley is cheating — he thinks it’s unfair when Wesley chooses to play as Jigglypuff, a flying creature from the Pokémon franchise that can sing its opponents to sleep — he gets only a giggle in reply.

    There are just three players today, but Farrenkopf’s had as many as 30 people at other tournaments. One in July attracted a crowd that included parents and grandparents of the young competitors. The game is projected onto a large screen in the library’s biggest meeting room, and by the end of the day, patrons who had never heard of Super Smash Brothers were poking their heads in to watch the action.

    In the off-season, when the library hosts the tournaments on Tuesday nights, groups of semi-professional adult players come from all over the Cape. Farrenkopf says that the kids don’t mind playing against semi-pros: they end up gaining skills that way.

    Librarian Corey Farrenkopf sits behind the gear he sets up for gaming tournaments at the Eastham Public Library.

    The first Super Smash Brothers video game was released in 1999, and since then there have been four sequels, each with its own dedicated fan base: 2001’s Super Smash Brothers Melee still has tournaments offering prizes in the tens of thousands of dollars. The sixth Smash Ultimate Summit tournament, played in Los Angeles in March 2023, had a prize pool of $104,247. At the library, though, the play is purely for fun.

    Wesley says he’s been playing for a year or two. Based on my performance against him, I’ve got a lot to learn. Being good at this means being able to estimate the number of frames involved in each character’s movements, for instance, in order to time punches and blocks more effectively.

    Smash is just one of the games that get competitive at the Eastham library. Farrenkopf also holds Mario Kart tournaments and nights where people go head to head in tabletop card games like Pokémon or Magic: the Gathering. Farrenkopf says he believes it’s important to have children’s programming that “goes beyond story time or a magic show.”

    Farrenkopf, who is 33, grew up in Harwich in the days before Super Smash Brothers Ultimate. He says he remembers a time when game stores were common on Cape Cod. Back then, if he wanted to play a game of Magic: the Gathering, it wasn’t difficult find a group — even the Masonic Lodge in Orleans hosted casual tournaments from time to time.

    Today, most multiplayer video games are played online, which makes it hard for players to find a reason to leave the house. Farrenkopf hopes to emphasize the social aspect of gaming with his library gatherings.

    “Want to play another round?” Farrenkopf asks. Jay and Wesley both say they do.

    The library’s next game day is Saturday, Oct. 26 from 1 to 3:15 p.m. Players are encouraged to bring their decks of Pokémon and Magic: the Gathering cards. All ages and skill levels are welcome.

    TALES AND TAILS

    In Eastham, They Read Aloud to Dogs

    On the first Saturday of every month, a chance to share devotion to literature and fur

    By

    EASTHAM — Dogs are not known for their literary prowess, their exceptional reading comprehension skills, nor for staying put for extended periods of time. Yet on the morning of March 2, in the children’s program room at the Eastham Public Library, four dogs from Hearts & Paws laid down their heads and listened to local children read aloud from canine-themed picture books.

    RUMINANTS

    Four-Legged Friends of Eastham Library Are on the Job

    Goats are eating poison ivy and bittersweet, but they’re eschewing knotweed

    By

    EASTHAM — Dragon, Wizard, Myles, and little Bleu have spent the last two weeks eating invasive poison ivy, bittersweet, and autumn olive behind the Eastham Public Library on Samoset Road. The quartet of male goats, like any contractors worth their salt, won’t leave until the job is completed, which will likely be by the end of this week.

    The goats at the Eastham library are nearly finished with their two-week invasive vegetation removal gig. (Photos by Marcia Geier)

    On the gentle slope between the library’s newly renovated building and the shores of neighboring Depot Pond, Goat Green Cape Cod owner Stacey Greaves has set up an electric fence around an area measuring roughly 50 by 150 feet. Inside their enclosure, the goats are hard at work clearing leafy treats. All they need from human caretakers is daily water, Greaves said.

    “Some of the plants encroach on the library land where children play,” Greaves said. The goats will push the growth back and “take off some of the overwhelmingness” for the library’s volunteer gardeners, who have been managing the vegetation by hand since the new building opened in 2016.

    Light-footed and strong of stomach, goats can be effectively deployed as an alternative to using chemical herbicides on brush, though given the location of the overgrown area next to the pond, herbicides were never on the table, said Library Director Melanie McKenzie.

    Goats’ grazing radius is higher off the ground than sheep and cows, making them adaptable to steep and uneven terrain. And their intestines break down unwanted seeds like nobody’s business. Their overall clearing speed depends on the weather, Greaves said. On beautiful days, the workday sails by, while rain and scorching heat both slow down the munching.

    Goats can graze on bittersweet that has grown high into trees.

    “The Friends of the Eastham Library are thrilled to be sponsoring this unique project,” McKenzie wrote to the Independent. “They are not especially interested in knotweed, unfortunately,” she added. A ground-cover solution for the library’s invasive knotweed is still being discussed by the open space committee. Greaves said goats prefer knotweed in “earlier stages of growth.”

    Greaves has 20 goats on staff at her company, which she founded in 2015. She was inspired by her love of animals but also by the idea of “helping keep herbicides off the ground in Cape Cod,” she said. Last season, Greaves said, she had approximately 40 clients during the season from mid-May through October and 80 projects on the goat waiting list.

    At the library, she’s made sure to personally visit the four goats or have a volunteer go every day since they arrived on May 15. “I make sure they’re okay before the library opens.”

    The library’s gardening volunteers first brought the idea of using goats for vegetation management to McKenzie. After Greaves came to the library for a site visit in late January, McKenzie filed for approval from the conservation commission.

    At a March 28 meeting, someone raised a question about goat poop: would it run into the pond? But Conservation Agent Keith Johnson explained that the goats’ veggie-heavy fecal matter was “almost essentially pre-composted vegetative material” — essentially, a natural fertilizer. The request was approved unanimously.

    According to McKenzie, the library’s contract with Greaves cost $1,450.

    Although it seems they’ll eat anything, the goats do not like mature knotweed, according to their wrangler, Stacey Greaves.

    This is not the first time that Greaves’s goats have managed vegetation on the Outer Cape. In June 2021, they were deployed in Provincetown at the behest of the open space committee to clean up the overgrown community garden in the West End. But two days after their arrival, the six goats on the job escaped. A spontaneous herding effort ensued, and after the fracas, Greaves returned the naughty flock to Barnstable.

    A fence failure was the cause of that breakout, Greaves said. “It doesn’t happen often, but they know when the fence is off, for starters,” she said. That’s part of why people are not allowed to enter the enclosure and pet the goats while they’re on a job, she said.

    Eastham has hired a goat quartet before. In 2011, the dept. of public works adopted four goats to help clear invasive plants around Wiley Pond and other areas. But a year later, the goats were returned to the Cape and Islands Farm Bureau, according to news reports at the time.

    Using freelance goats seems easier. Goat vegetation management operations need to be carefully managed to incite heavy trampling and consumption in the areas you want to clear. But once these master mowers finish the job, they get antsy.

    “In the event they finish up before I get there, volunteers are instructed to give them grain and hay,” Greaves said. “I don’t want them ever to be hungry.”

    NATURALIZATION

    The Path to Citizenship Goes Through Eastham

    At the library, immigrants study the Declaration of Independence and discuss the concept of home

    By

    EASTHAM — The class was on lesson six, “Important Symbols in Our Lives,” at the start of the third session at the Eastham Public Library on May 16, and all four of immigration attorney Stephanie Souza’s students were finding it easy to describe the significance of the 13 stripes and 50 stars on the American flag.

    On Tuesday evenings through June 6, Souza is guiding groups of potential citizens through eras and milestones in U.S. history in preparation for the naturalization test. Her students are doing well, she said, but the last class is designed to calm some nerves: it will include video of an actual naturalization interview.

    Attendance in the class has ranged from four to seven participants. Some are just thinking about applying for citizenship. “Some people take a while to make that move,” she said.

    The class moved on to the history of the Statue of Liberty. Lady Liberty was described as symbolic of “the friendship between France and America.”

    “It should say North America,” pointed out Mauricio Zuleta, who is originally from Chile. Zuleta is one of several members of the class who hasn’t yet applied for citizenship but plans to.

    Zuleta works at two Provincetown guest houses, the Captain’s House and the Chicago House, and has been a U.S. resident for eight years. He hopes to avoid the green card renewal process when his expires in two years. But beyond that bureaucratic impetus, Zuleta’s main thinking, he said, has been, “Why not? My home is here.”

    The ineffable and various meanings of “home” came up in lesson seven, which covered U.S. geography. “What are the best things about the place where you live?” Souza asked.

    “My job,” said Delmar Bliss, whose work in stonemasonry takes him all around the Cape. “I work everywhere,” Bliss said, and he likes it — especially the satisfaction he gets from finishing a project.

    Born in Jamaica, Bliss has been living in the U.S. since 2007. He attends Souza’s class with his wife, Courtney Lawless Bliss, a massage therapist. She is already a citizen, Bliss said. “She’s just supporting me,” he said. “She thinks I need to learn about the culture of America.”

    The Blisses share the Fourth of July as a birthday, the class was amused to learn during a lesson on national holidays. Their 11-year-old daughter, Hattie, perused the library during the two-hour class, poking her head in once to let her parents know she’d found books to check out. “She reads a lot,” Bliss said.

    As the class moved swiftly through the curriculum, each lesson ended with a series of civics test questions included on the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) list of 100 potential citizenship questions. During a naturalization interview, an applicant will be asked 10 questions selected at random from that list — and must answer six of those correctly to pass that part of the test.

    The questions require more than just rudimentary knowledge of U.S. civics: “How many amendments does the Constitution have?” is one. Answer: 27. Another asks, “If both the President and the Vice President can no longer serve, who becomes President?” Answer: the Speaker of the House.

    As participants took turns reading aloud, the others murmured the words to themselves in hushed tones. For some of them, it was practice for the English language test that is also part of the naturalization interview. The candidate’s ability to proficiently answer the USCIS officer’s formal questions during the oral interview is also considered part of the English test. Souza does not anticipate either test being an obstacle for anyone in the class: applicants’ English needs to be conversational to pass and, in this class, she said, everyone speaks English well.

    Souza works for the Community Action Committee of Cape Cod and the Islands, a Hyannis-based nonprofit that offers free legal assistance to immigrants. Her organization set out to collaborate with the Eastham library to offer the course because distance from naturalization resources can be a barrier for eligible citizens at this end of the Cape especially, she said.

    Souza had never taught a citizenship class before this one. (Her only teaching experience had been with grade schoolers in California years ago, she said.) She acquired the lesson plans from two volunteer citizenship class teachers in Hyannis.

    Sherman Wilson, originally from Jamaica, is a four-year Cape Cod resident who lives in Dennis and does housekeeping and maintenance in Provincetown. He found out about the Eastham class when he met with Souza at her office after deciding to pursue citizenship. He filed his application on March 31 and heard back from USCIS on May 5. He was surprised his application went through so fast — his naturalization interview will take place in June.

    Souza said she also found the quick turnaround time surprising when she started practicing immigration law in 2021. “I’m finding that most of my clients are becoming citizens within three or four months” of applying, she said.

    That’s one thing she wishes more people knew — that the naturalization process isn’t necessarily as drawn out as some expect, and that there’s free legal aid available for those eligible and interested.

    Three weeks into the six-session citizenship course, Souza and the participants swept through lesson plans apace. As they reached the end of a unit and went over its corresponding civics test questions, Souza put the class through a multi-century review encompassing questions about the Declaration of Independence, the War of 1812, and principles of checks and balances. As she fired off questions, the class sprang to answer right away.

    “They’re good!” Souza said.

    On May 31 at 2 p.m., U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services will hold a nationwide virtual engagement session where it will discuss possible redesigns of the naturalization test. Registration is on the citizenship resource center area of the USCIS website.

    ARCHITECTURE

    At the Library, an Old Town Settles Into a New Design

    Seven years after a renovation in Eastham, a look at where intentions meet reality

    By

    EASTHAM — Its architects proposed a purpose to practically every nook and cranny of the Eastham Public Library — a sunlit pondside edifice unveiled in 2016. Seven years later, it’s proving to be a design that satisfies.

    “We used warm materials, materials that are sympathetic of the Outer Cape style and context,” says Matt Oudens of Oudens Ello Architecture, the Boston firm that designed the renovation. Maple and pine flooring and exposed wooden beams (they’re “glulam” — engineered of bonded wood laminations), for example, help make the contemporary design feel somehow both grand and friendly.

    Oudens says that one of his team’s priorities was designing the roughly 17,000-square-foot addition in a way that wouldn’t overwhelm the surrounding residential neighborhood.

    The library runs on solar power and also incorporates energy-saving technologies like a dimming system that adjusts lighting according to the natural light available.

    Eastham resident Dale Wade was initially skeptical of the renovation for exactly this reason. “I wasn’t fond of the drawings,” she remembers, because “they seemed out of scale and too modern.”

    The plan called for a 300-square-foot room from the library’s initial construction in 1897 to be preserved cheek-by-jowl with the new building, and Wade remembers thinking the new design would overwhelm “the little remainder of the library that they were going to keep.”

    The new wood-shingled façade pleased her, though. And as soon as Wade walked in, she was swayed by the interior. Although she mainly uses the online catalog to access books on tape, she’s a regular visitor now, coming in to read periodicals by the fireplace.

    Wade is also a member of the Eastham Library Art Committee. The building’s scale has answered a community need for exhibition space for creators who don’t have an outlet, she says. A repurposed books exhibit has become one of the library’s anticipated events.

    The renovation, which cost $9.6 million and replaced the 8,000-square-foot annex constructed in 1980, received $4.3 million from a Mass. Public Library Construction Program grant from the Mass. Board of Library Commissioners.

    That covered 45 percent of the costs. Most of the rest of the funding was municipal, though a group including trustees created the Eastham Library Building Fund, a nonprofit that paid for furniture and signage. Individual donors also contributed.

    From the street, the building appears to have an unassuming single story. But the design succeeds at a Mary Poppins-like feat of expanding once you’re inside it.

    Oudens credits the setting for some of that feeling. Two things he said he wanted library visitors to be in touch with at all times: the outdoors and “useful space.”

    At the north end of the building, an airy reading room includes floor-to-ceiling windows and comfy armchairs that make it a scenic place to read. Homey touches counterbalance the scale of the space. In one corner, an indoor birding station equipped with binoculars, a monocular, and an Eastern bird field guide awaits. The gas fireplace is on the adjacent wall.

    The Eastham Public Library’s central reading room overlooks Depot Pond. (Photos by Agata Storer)

    As idyllic as it looks, the site was challenging to build on, says Oudens.

    A first move was to relocate the parking lot, which was formerly situated between the building and the kettle pond. Now it’s on a road-abutting parcel acquired by the town, a move that allowed for restoration of the wetland area, according to Oudens.

    The lower level, which isn’t visible from the street, includes windows that take advantage of the hill beside the lake. A children’s room with curving bookshelves overlooks a grassy area outside. That’s become the place for a weekly preschool story hour, but children’s use of the space isn’t contingent on weather, says Ruth Gail Cohen, a retired teacher and library volunteer who’s also on the board of the library’s friends. “On a rainy day in the summer,” she says, “it’s a real haven for parents and grandparents.”

    When the library first opened, Cohen says, “I was just gob-smacked.” After the breaking-in period, she’s still a fan. “I’m so proud of it,” she says.

    The south-facing roofs hold solar panels that generate all the energy the library uses. And with the help of a daylight dimming system — sensors register how much natural light is entering the building and adjust artificial lighting accordingly — energy consumption is reduced.

    The library, Oudens says, is intended to be a community space that’s more than just a place to read. And that is proving to be the case. A device at the door counted 49,041 visitors in 2022, says Library Director Melanie McKenzie.

    The main flaw of the new library is that “we didn’t think about how much storage space we could possibly need,” says Debbie Abbott, president of the friends of the library. The flip side of the focus on access and public use left little attention to book carts and bulletin boards — things that keep wheels turning behind the scenes.

    Certain aspects of the library may work a bit too well. Like other municipal buildings, the library is on OpenCape’s high-speed internet network. Signs in the parking lot asking patrons to turn off their headlights were installed after neighbors spoke up, McKenzie said. But wi-fi is, after all, an important community service out here.

    The library is also equipped with a backup generator that powers its community spaces. When residents’ electricity goes out, the library goes into overdrive. People come for a cup of coffee, to charge their phones, and simply to see each other. Once, Oudens says, when people sought refuge during a power outage, there was an impromptu ukulele concert.

    BOOK MAKERS

    Old Books, Reembodied

    Ephemeral sculpture, fashion, and imaginary worlds emerge from repurposed pages

    By

    When the Eastham Public Library takes books out of circulation, either because they’re damaged or haven’t been checked out in years, they give them to students at Eastham Elementary School, Nauset Middle School, and Nauset High School. But not to read. The students remake them into something entirely new..

    “Teachers have embraced the idea and included book art in their curriculums,” says Marianne Sinopoli, who is the outreach librarian in Eastham. The books, now creatively repurposed, have returned to the library and will be on view through the month of February. The exhibition, sponsored by Friends of the Eastham Library, features student art, as well as works submitted by adults.

    Liana Kiszka, a grade-12 student at Nauset Regional High School, won grand prize in the high school sculpture category for Into a New World. “I wanted to make it look like you are walking into the book you are reading, almost like a magical land,” she said. “I took inspiration from Roald Dahl.” (Photos by Agata Storer)

     

    Abbey Koutnik won a grand prize in the adult category for Living in the Word.

     

    A selection of pieces on view in the stairwell at the Eastham Public Library.

     

    Claire Whitlock, a fifth-grader at Eastham Elementary School, won in the elementary school category for her piece, Mushroom Castle. “I really like mushrooms,” she said. “I have a lot of mushroom things in my bedroom. I like how they look, the colors, and all the details.”

     

    Into a New World by Liana Kiszka.
    Flower Garden by Rihanna Sutherland, a grade-10 student at Nauset Regional High School.

     

    A selection of dresses created from books. Tess Williams’s Flower Dress (far left) won grand prize in the fashion design category.
    Lillian Peck, a ninth-grader at Nauset Regional High School, won an honorable mention for her sculpture, The Pony.

    Upcycling

    The event: Repurposed Book Art Exhibit
    The time: Through Feb. 28
    The place: Eastham Public Library (190 Samoset Road)
    The cost: Free

    PAGE TURNERS

    Repurposed Books Tell New Stories

    Eastham students create art for ‘love your library month’

    By

    When libraries grow tight on space, worn books are usually thrown out or given away. At the Eastham Public Library, they metamorphose into art.

    The fifth annual Repurposed Book Art Contest, skipped last year because of the pandemic, marks a revived collaboration among the library, Eastham schools, and the town’s artistic community. The 115 entries remain on display through the end of February, also known as “love your library month,” said Outreach Librarian Marianne Sinopoli.

    Nauset Regional High School junior Juniper O’Campbell spent nearly a month carefully styling pages of Shakespeare onto cardboard to make a plunged, caged dress, decorated with origami flowers and splashed with bright watercolors.

    Fashion design submissions to the Eastham library’s Repurposed Book Art Contest. (Photos by Nancy Bloom)

    “I wanted the dress to be fantastical, like something a character in fiction or a video game would wear,” said O’Campbell during the exhibit’s opening reception on Feb. 10. “That’s why it’s called Off the Page.”

    O’Campbell was the grand-prize winner in the contest’s fashion design division. In partnership with art classes offered at the high school, students competed in three categories: fashion design, art metals, and sculpture.

    NRHS senior Eric Zou received an honorable mention for his metalwork, a picture of a Chinese scholar cut from an old book and soldered onto a malleated scroll. The work represents “what I do on a daily basis, taking every experience and learning something new from it,” he writes in the description. Engraved on the back of the scroll is the Chinese word 智慧, meaning wisdom.

    Nauset Regional Middle School students competed with an array of sculptures, including eighth-grader Delaney Kavanaugh’s tall Tree of Life. Kindergarten through fourth-grade students at Eastham Elementary School crafted two-dimensional posters of books cut and glued into portraits of dogs and cats.

    Left to right: Avie Williams, Gianna Carbone, and Riely May Anderson.

    There were three sculptures submitted in the adult division, including David Martin’s Pages From a Plague: The Masque of Red Death in Our Time, a wooden box of historical figures in masks surrounded by burnt book pages, and NRHS art teacher Ginny Ogden’s colorful Birds in Love, featuring pictures from books about birds local to Cape Cod. “It’s fun to have the students see it’s something I enjoy, too,” Ogden said.

    Eastham Art Committee member Brendan Mruk and chair Willow Shire were the judges. Pieces were graded according to theme, balance, stability, color, and the narrative conveyed in the work’s description. For each submission, Shire detailed her observations and encouraged students to continue to create.

    “The youth are educating the adults,” she said. “As adults run around in our busy lives, we ignore a lot. These kids are not ignoring it.”

    Suffering Words by Azalea Rushby and Arielli Lemos.

    NRHS sophomores Azalea Rushby and Arielli Lemos spent four months working with old medical journals, popsicle sticks, and a book of Victorian house blueprints to create their sculpture, Suffering Words, replicating an “insane asylum” where mentally ill people who sought help were mistreated.

    The house “is overfilling with pain, and the things these people wish they could have said to the doctors, and the people that brought them there,” Lemos said. She hopes her work can provide historical context for contemporary mistrust of the mental health system.

    NRHS sophomores Mary Keyes and Mady Enos cut rows of steps into their sculpture Europe Aroused, which they topped with pictures of vintage buildings and glued faces. The work, the grand-prize winner in the sculpture division, is a “reimagining of the agony that plagued the streets of Europe in the 16th century,” according to the description.

    Mary Keyes (left) and Mady Enos with Europe Aroused.

    Fifth-grade students at Eastham Elementary School made houses out of their books. Riely May Anderson says there isn’t much of a story behind her artwork, titled The House Secret, but what’s important is “it makes people feel at home.” Finley Simpson’s The Club House features a top floor where there is “a fruit bowl for everyone.” Down below are small cat houses, inspired by her own cat, Zipper, and decorated with red hearts. The message is “to love cats,” she said.

    Blaise Donoho’s Chaos came together when “thinking of something crazy to make with a bunch of random stuff.” The finished piece is an avant-garde collection of used duct tape rolls, bottle caps, wire, popsicle sticks, scraps of paper, and plastic golden stars he found.

    The idea for a book art contest came about as the library was undergoing a renovation in 2016 and Circulation Supervisor Freya Hemley was looking for ideas to recycle volumes no longer on display. With the help of Sinopoli, the books were donated to the schools. Friends of the Eastham Library offered to fund the project. As more teachers joined in, Hemley said the contest quickly “took on a life of its own.”

    Hands On (Sat.)

    By

    Drop by the Eastham Public Library’s outdoor patio at 190 Samoset Road on Saturday, Aug. 7 between 11 a.m. and noon for a pop-up science table. Kids will learn about the brain, skeletons, and outer space with high school senior Abby. The free event will have “awesome hand-outs.”

    Busy Bee

    By

    Join master gardener Fran Raleigh for “Let’s Talk Pollinators,” a free outdoor event at the Eastham Public Library, 190 Samoset Road, on Thursday, June 24th, at 11 a.m. Learn how to attract birds, bees, and butterflies to your garden. Suitable for all ages; bring a blanket. To register, visit easthamlibrary.org.

     

    Open Book

    By

    How have reading habits changed since the pandemic? Tricia Ford, director of the Truro Public Library, and Debra DeJonker-Berry, director of the Eastham Public Library, will discuss this and more in “Adapting and Innovating: What’s on the Horizon for Our Public Libraries?,” a Zoom talk hosted by the Nauset Fellowship, on Sunday, May 30th, at 10 a.m. Registration is free at nfuu.org.

     

    Cook the Books

    By

    The Eastham Public Library presents the “Chewy Decimal Cooking Show” on Saturday, April 17th, at 1 p.m. Elaine Lipton will prepare two dishes from India: shrimp curry and gajar ka halwa, a carrot pudding. Watch on YouTube, or local channels 11 and 18. Then, stick around for a Zoom Q&A at 1:45 p.m. Registration is free at easthamlibrary.org.

     

    Hot Topic

    By

    Join the Eastham Public Library for “Arctic Meltdown and Why It Matters,” a Zoom presentation by Jennifer Francis, senior scientist at Woodwell Climate Research Center, on Thursday, April 1st, from 7 to 8:15 p.m. Registration is free at easthamlibrary.org.

     

    True Blood

    By

    Eastham Public Library is holding a blood drive on Wednesday, March 31st, from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Call 508-86BLOOD to schedule an appointment.

    Young at Art

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    “Youth Is a Work of Art” is a virtual art exhibit by the Eastham Public Library featuring work by Nauset Regional High School students. It includes prints, drawings, paintings, photographs, woodworking, and metalworking. A preview opens Monday, March 22nd, with new pieces posted through April 9th. Visit easthamlibrary.org to view or submit.

    What a Treat

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    Celebrate Samuel Treat Day with the Eastham Public Library on Thursday, March 18th. There will be a Zoom panel discussion, “The Life of Samuel Treat: Pastor for Eastham and the Nauset Praying Indians,” from 10 to 11:30 a.m. Then, from 11:30 a.m. to 2:30 p.m., visit outdoor sites such as the Cove Burying Ground. Finally, join David Silverman for the Zoom talk “When Things Fall Apart: Samuel Treat, the Wampanoags, and the Place of Christian Indians in Colonial New England,” from 3 to 4:30 p.m. Registration is free at easthamlibrary.org.

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