With sunshine blessing both events, last Sunday’s BARK Fest and Saturday’s Spring Fling Open House served as fitting bookends for an exceedingly positive week in Brookhaven.

     A fundraiser for the Brookhaven Animal Rescue League, BARK Fest was the brainchild of a group of Mississippi School of the Arts students who wanted to help BARL. Set on the lawn of the MSA campus on a gorgeous spring afternoon, the festival featured live music and plenty of things to do, from picking out a BARL pet to adopt to browsing through a tent full of donated items for sale.

     It was also a good afternoon to bring your own pet and sit and just listen to the music and visit with friends and neighbors.

     Saturday’s Spring Fling Open House, featuring 20 local retail businesses, also provided a chance to do plenty of meeting and greeting, while also finding bargains to buy and registering for door prizes.

     The Easter Bunny, who made numerous visits around town Saturday, can’t help but be a crowd pleaser, but the big draw of the day had to be the fashion show on Brookway Boulevard featuring local children modeling Easter finery. Digital cameras and smart phones were everywhere in the audience of parents, grandparents, other family members and friends crowded around the stage decked in paper bunnies, eggs and flowers.

     The Boulevard was wall-to-wall cars in the morning when most of the events there were held, and activities moved downtown in the afternoon. A quick check of car tags Saturday found most were from Lincoln County, but there also were cars from Copiah, Pike, Adams, Lawrence, Franklin and Lamar counties, along with more than a few from Louisiana and some from the Jackson area.

     Next year, Angie Warren, Chamber of Commerce Retail Committee chairman, would like to have a late-afternoon concert on the MSA lawn to wrap up the Spring Fling. That’s a great idea, and judging from the way the music at the BARK Fest was received, an evening concert on the green would be equally popular.

     Sunday’s and Saturday’s events weren’t the only things going on around town last week.

     On Monday, Region 8 Mental Health Services opened a new 29,000-square-foot facility on Highway 51. The well-attended dedication and open house Monday morning included tours of the building, which will offer outpatient treatment facilities for area residents.

     The large brick building, which is a replica of another Region 8 facility recently completed in Canton, was built without tax dollars and is totally paid for, according to Region 8 officials. When I asked where the money came from, I was told it came from patient fees. That would mean health insurance, patient co-pays, etc.

     Region 8’s new building is definitely an investment in the future of Lincoln County, and Friday’s news that local unemployment has dropped below 10 percent, to 9.7 percent, was yet another sign that the economy is slowly recovering.

     The day after the Region 8 open house, Tuesday afternoon added yet another event to last week’s agenda. The “Afternoon at The Museum” showcased the massive amount of work the Lincoln County Historical and Genealogical Society has done over the past year and a half transforming the former Jewish Temple into the Lincoln County Historical and Genealogical Museum and B’nai Sholom Jewish Heritage Museum.

     Besides the historical items from the former Jewish congregation, the museum is packed with interesting memorabilia ranging from Tallulah Ragsdale photographs, to a 1926-27 Lincoln County Public School System report card from Enterprise, to a Civilian Conservation Corps panoramic photograph from 1935, to Whitworth College yearbooks, to Brookhaven Centennial items, to local sports memorabilia and much, much, much more.

     A video converted from an old film of the Centennial was playing during the afternoon event and drew much interest. The dulcimer band was another nice touch.

     Spring and music were definitely in the air in Brookhaven last week, along with more than a good measure of upbeat news.

     General Manager Rachel Eide can be reached at The DAILY LEADER AT 601-833-6961 ext. 153; by e-mail at reide@dailyleader.com; or via mail at P.O. Box 551, Brookhaven, MS 39602-0551.