Not kaput

Yes.  It has been awhile.  A long while.  But even though nothing has been posted here in quite some time, GroveAtopia continues on.  Like a good book where the characters seem to carry on even when you close the it, GroveAtopia is here whether we read and write about it or not.  It is not kaput.

In fact, the Lovely Season has arrived and once again all is green, fluffy, mild and moist.  The air is soft.  The birds are busy.  And the flowers we somehow manage to forget about every year have returned.

In a way it is a blessing that we forget because then every year we get to be surprised again at how lovely it all is.  If you ever sigh with boredom at the reappearance of the Lovely Season, then something is seriously wrong.  Consider seeing a doctor.

But for now, let's turn our attention to some of the many many many things that have happened while we haven't been writing about them.

One of them is the new exhibit at our museum.

We talked about it when it needed painting, then again when it got painted, and now it's getting a new exhibit.  It's a big deal, because for a very long time the museum was, well, a museum, but not in the best sense of the word.  It was really GroveAtopia's attic, chock full of things that people had left on the doorstep, or that relatives had brought by thinking the museum should have them simply because they were old.

Apparently the museum very rarely said no, and the result was a tremendous mish-mash of old stuff.  There was so much of it, it was stored in the neighboring annex building.  There was so much of it that the annex building was rarely opened.  There was so much of it that no one could make any sense of it without a personal tour.  Even then the stuff in there was, well stuff.  It told snippets of unrelated stories about GroveAtopia's past, but no one had ever put it together into a coherent exhibit that told a coherent story about our town's past.

Until now.  Through a series of fortunate events, two teachers from one of GroveAtopia's small schools were awarded a Teaching American History grant to do just that - teach american history.  They decided to teach GroveAtopia's piece of american history by developing a series of small exhibits that depict life in Cottage Grove as it was in the late 19th and early 20th century.

The exhibit is called "Living Our History" and it opens this weekend.  You can read about it here.

If you are lucky you can come to the opening, enjoy the exhibit and enjoy some food from Big Stuff BBQ. If not, perhaps you can drop by sometime when the museum is open.  And by the way, the museum is open from 1-4, not 10-3 like it says in the newspaper.