Help us welcome "The Farmer and the Chickpea," new to our Saturday Farmer's Market. Jillian tells us what their philosophy is:

"We are 'The Farmer and the Chickpea' and we're a farmer's market company. We use as local and as real food as possible. Nothing has more than five ingredients in it. We work with local farmers in New Jersey; for example, this kale just came off of the farm yesterday. This spinach was literally super sandy when they delivered it yesterday after picking it. We'll base our recipes on what is available that week. You can come to our store in Whitehouse Station, New Jersey. You can eat there or you can get take-out. But we are farmer's market based, so we always sell things prepared, ready to go."

"About three years ago in May, I lived up in Reading and worked in the mall. There was a huge hail storm that decided to hit. You just heard the thunder kinda come and then all of a sudden the shattered windows, and I walked out of the mall. The top was shredded to pieces and the windshield was shattered and I lost two mirrors. But it runs good and I didn't want to recycle it, so I decided to take a creative spin on it. My dad and I cut a bunch of circles out of black tape and stuck 'em on the car. I get people who stop and try to take pictures all the time."

Crystal (third from left, center row) tell why the group is wearing their orange shirts:

"My husband, Bill Moser, passed away this past October from bladder cancer. He was diagnosed two years ago. He went through surgeries, bit they didn't keep it from spreading. He fought for one year and lost his battle. We're out here today to support and help raise money for bladder cancer, so this is family and friends that have all donated and come out to walk with me for the walk today."

​If you'd like to donate, go to bladdercanceradvocacynetwork.org.

"We went to a Steampunk convention. We had *one day* to make costumes and get ourselves ready for a Steampunk convention that we knew about *months* ahead of time and decided last minute that we were going to handmake our costumes. That was the most exciting and intense thing we've done together."

Her: "We met when we were very small children. Our parents were good friends."
Him: "Yup. Two or three years old. She was my first date when I was about four, five, or six, or something like that, and she completely denies it. (She laughs) I really wasn't into girls until high school..."
Her: "He was a late bloomer." (They laugh)
"How long have you been together?"
Him: "Going on 63 years"
"What's your favorite thing about her?"
Him: "We think alike. We even *look* alike..." (They laugh)
Her: "You *do* get to look alike." (More laughing)
"What's your favorite thing about him?"
Her: "That he puts up with me. He's an easy person to get along with."

"When my first son was born, I was off the coast of Hawaii. I was in the navy at the time and we were doing Operation RIMPAC; it's a military exercise that we do where it's my group--I was on the U.S.S. Constellation, a U.S. carrier--against another U.S. carrier, which was the U.S.S. Independence. We had the Canadian Navy, the Australian Navy, the Japanese Navy, and the South Korean Navy, all one big old wargame. During that time, I got my AMCROSS message when my son was born. I didn't get to see him until he was two weeks old. The did offer to give me emergency leave, but the would only give me a week, and my son was here on the East coast, so it wouldn't have been worth it. So, I made a deal with my chief engineer and he told me that if I didn't mess up the watch bill, the moment we hit San Diego, the moment the brow hit the pier, I'd be off the boat with two weeks leave, so I got to spend two weeks with him. That was 21 years ago." 

"I found Pepper wandering the West Ward, my ex-girlfriend and I, and she literally ran up and jumped into my ex-girlfriend's arms and we carried her home. We walked around the neighborhood and found the previous owners. She had her brother and a couple of young children and she said, 'I can't handle 'em all. She's had all her shots. If you'll treat her well, please take her.' And that was almost three years ago."

Paul Deery, designer of Waterway, a new installation on the Karl Stirner Arts Trail, explains its origins and execution:

"So, first, what I did when they put out a call to artists for the proposals, they asked for a site specific installation work. I came out here in the late winter last year and I just walked the trail a couple of times. I just started seeing spots where something could go , and I have a couple of different other ideas that I was thinking about, because I have another sculpture here in town. It's called "Chime Tree" and it's a bike rack sculpture that was commissioned by the city a couple years ago, over by Riverside Park. It has these bells that hang from it; it's an interactive sculpture where you can ring the bells. So I thought about doing something like that along the trail. But then when I was walking and I was looking at some of the space and I was looking at all the information plaques, I wanted to have something that was a little *more* interactive in the actual environment. So, I saw this space because of the old Silk Mill across the creek and I just started envisioning something that people could walk through, and how it curves and how the creek curves and everything kind of moves with the creek, it gave me this idea: I wanted to give people that feeling in a short couple of moments of engaging and interacting in that kind of space. 

"There's three streams I fish: the Bushkill, the Monocacy, and the Saucon. I like to come down the Bushkill because the water runs down a little deeper here, the trout are a little bigger here, there's some nice holdover Brown Trout in this stream. It's catch-and-release. I get hungry to eat one every once in awhile; maybe once a year I'll keep one or two, but I usually release them. Today I released about fifteen or twenty trout."

"I was part of the rebirth of Easton back in the early 70s. There were three Mohican marketplaces that was an old chain--one was in easton, one was in Bethlehem, one was in Allentown. My intention was to bring new businesses into Easton, so I converted it into six or seven different boutiques including my hairdressing salon, and then opened up a private nightclub disco in the basement. In three months, I had 2200 members. And I opened two weeks before Saturday Night Fever hit the big screen, so I hit a wave. But my intention was to be part of bringing Easton back again. It's getting there. If we could just get more things like the Public Market happening, because a lot of the businesses downtown are friends of mine and I said to them, 'Is this helping you?' And, yeah it is. I've never seen so much traffic as what I'm seeing now. It's a good start."  

Local poet Beth Seetch recently had one of her poems painted onto a wall in the tunnel between the Karl Stirner Arts Trail and the Easton Cemetery. She explained to me how it came to be, and began with a recitation of her poem:

"'Turn me into water
Pour me
from a great
​height
Into a bent-corner
Cedar box
May I overflow.'

The last few years, I've been writing a poem a day in April, and one April we were vacationing in Portland, Oregon, waterfalls everywhere, Native American art--bent-corner boxes, which are not caskets; they're meant to hold water. I was taking notes and firing on all this stuff and this is one of the few poems I've written with very little change in just one or two sittings. And then I really like the Cemetery. I write about the Cemetery sometimes, too. And cutting to the chase, last summer when the Friends of the Karl Stirner Arts Trail and Jim (Toia, of the Lafayette College Arts Program) said 'Let's have a little competition to generate more art to go on the trail.' I had sent the poem to Jim earlier and he said, 'Let's make sure we try that as a wall poem.' So, because he had the means to make that happen, the means of production and the labor, we did it. We finally got it done. So now we're hoping it's going to be the first of several more wall poems in Easton. I was the Guinea pig." (Laughs)