The Times of Trenton Living News

Stories on kids & families, lifestyles & more

• To downsize or reconfigure,
that was the question It seemed inevitable. Or was it just another "everyone's doing it, so maybe I should, too" phase? Was it like the "everybody's getting married" or "all my friends are having babies" rites of passage?

• For 55 years, their gardens have grown
When the West Trenton Garden Club gathers for its monthly meet ing Monday, members will pore over scrapbooks they have kept over five-and-a-half decades. This group of gardening enthusiasts has a rich history to celebrate. Chances are, if there is a beautifully landscaped public space in Ewing, it had something to do with it.

• Community effort
Each time a pint of Bent Spoon mint-flavored gour met ice cream is placed in the freezer case at the Whole Earth Center in Princeton Borough, a community effort comes full circle.

• Pie contest features
It's pie-baking time again in downtown Trenton.

• Passion, poetry infuse his art
The gentleman at the door, soft-spoken and gracious, welcomes you to his Kingston home, and begins to speak about his long life as a painter. He leads you through rooms that showcase his woodcuts, silk-screen prints, lithographs, oils and watercolors.

• 'Spitfire Grill' serves up
What makes an audience love a musical?

• Wilder offers history of mankind in three acts
As a playwright, Thornton Wilder is not usually listed with the big guns of the 20th-Century American stage -- O'Neill, Miller and Williams. Ironically, though, he wrote two ground-breaking pieces for the stage, almost diametric opposites of each other, that won Pulitzer Prizes and still captivate audiences.

• Now, knee
If you could watch it for your self, you'd probably feel a little squeamish but also fascinated: one surgeon fixing up your right knee while a second surgeon tends to your left knee. In half the time that two surgeries, whether separate or sequential, would take, both knees are replaced.

• A tale of two patients
John Pugliese of Hamilton says now, "If your knees are holding you back, go for it! Give it a shot."

• Sward in the stone
For several years, visitors to the greater Princeton area have been treated to a striking new form of gardening -- one in which plants are incorporated into whimsical structures. These pieces, which feature a stunning display of foliage forms and colors, are the work of Princeton resident Robert Cannon.

• All aboard for the first local
The day was hot but there was locally grown tea, heirloom tomatoes, grass-fed beef and sorbet to taste along the way, and plush buses for a cool ride through the miles of preserved green space that stretch between farms in Hopewell and West Amwell townships.

• Italian fest
They say that everyone is Irish on St. Patrick's Day, and this weekend, everyone can be Italian at the ninth annual Mercer County Italian American Festival, at least when it comes to eating.

• This may be the mother
arah Palin and I have a lot in common.