On the Run with John Stifler: Chocolatier runs Boston

The Boston Marathon has a pretty good system for keeping track of all participants. At the Boston Athletic Association’s website (baa.org) you can find, in the throng of approximately 30,000 runners, anyone who’s entered. During the race, you can see where on the course your runner is. Spending marathon day in the press room at the Copley Plaza Hotel, I searched for the runners from Hampshire County, and I found them all except for Kathie Williams, from Hatfield. I knew Kathie was entered. Why wasn’t she showing up on the screen when I typed her name? Because computers don’t always catch typos. As Kathie explained later, with appropriate amusement, she was so excited to be signing up on line for her first Boston Marathon that she typed her name wrong. If I had searched for “Kathie Willams” I would have found her, steadily making her way to the finish in six hours two minutes and 17 seconds.

Valley Bounty: Wild Life Flowers building community for people and pollinators

For Kimberly Longey, farmer-florist at Wild Life Flowers in Plainfield, the idea of the slow flower movement began with an appreciation for local food. “As a lover of flowers, I have purchased out-of-season blooms at the grocery store because they brightened my mood in the dead of winter. Even though I was conscious of where my food came from, I wasn’t really thinking about where my flowers came from,” says Longey.

Sew cool: Quilting is more than ‘grandma’s little hobby’ at biennial Hands Across the Valley Quilt Guild show, May 3 and 4

Hands Across the Valley Quilt Guild, an Amherst-based quilting group, will have its biennial show on Saturday, May 3, and Sunday, May 4, from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. at Hampshire College’s Robert Crown Center Gymnasium. The show will feature more than 200 quilts by local quilters.