GOOD MORNING, UPPER VALLEY!
Showers, blustery, kinda raw. The low pressure that brought us last night’s rain is shifting eastward today, and drier air will pay a visit, but there’s a chance of showers all day. The big question is their timing: Winds will be shifting over the course of the morning as colder air moves in, and once that happens we may see showers again, though they’re more likely to the west. What’s for sure is that we’ll see wind gusts for a good bit of the day, with highs in the mid 50s early afternoon but back down to around 50 and below right around when kids head out in the late afternoon. Mid 30s overnight, with snow down to around 1500 feet.
This rain’s kind of an exclamation point: Extreme drought is already receding in both states. As of Tuesday it still covered about 47 percent of VT (including most of Orange and Windsor counties) and 37 percent of NH (including big swaths of Grafton and Sullivan counties and the closest corner of Merrimack County), but hey: any improvement is good.
The sky never gets old. And sometimes, it makes your jaw drop. “Even after 30 years of waking up to this eastern sky, looking across the river towards Smarts and Dartmouth’s Skiway, today’s offering is yet another amazing blessing,” Doug Miller wrote from Thetford yesterday.
And speaking of yesterday, did you see Dear Daybreak? If not, you missed Susan AuBuchon’s beautiful shot of sunrise over Lake Sunapee; Katharine Lea’s story about tending milkweed seeds (you’ll understand when you read it); Susan Arnold’s poem about seizing the moment—or not; and Sara Ferguson’s tale (and photo) of a self-bursting cabbage. And Dear Daybreak always needs submissions. If you’ve got something to share, please send it in.
A bit more on Wednesday’s cold case search in New London. As you remember, the NH Cold Case Unit, along with Fish & Game officers and the New London PD, were at the Esther Currier wilderness area searching for evidence in the 1978 murder of 27-year-old Catherine Millican. The Valley News’s Lukas Dunford and photographer Alex Driehaus were there, too. “We’re conducting the search using technology that didn’t exist when Cathy Millican was murdered and when her body was discovered,” Chris Knowles, the chief of the cold case unit, said. “It’s our hope that by using new technology, we’ll be able to bring answers to the family and to the community.”
And a bit more on the new Jamaican restaurant in SoRo. Maryellen Apelquist visited the new K&P Restaurant and Bar on Monday, its first full day, and hung out with chef and owner Akeliyah Robinson—who’s got enough of a following from her WRJ catering days that last Saturday’s soft opening sold out early. She got her start in Jamaica cooking for tourists, then headed to NYC, where she worked a food cart, Jamrock Jerk, that crossed Midtown. And though Jamaican food is a mainstay at her new spot, the lineup includes Italian, Mexican, and traditional American. “What if I tell you that everything on this [menu] is my favorite stuff to cook?” she tells Apelquist.
SPONSORED: Dartmouth Skiway Early Bird Sale ends today! At midnight, prices increase on passes and weekly lessons, while season rentals will go off sale for the rest of the season. Don't miss your chance to lock in your winter at the best price! Sponsored by the Dartmouth Skiway.
Board approves demolition of two historic homes in Woodstock Village. On Monday, report Emma Stanton and Mike Donoghue in the VT Standard, the Village Development Review Board voted 3-2 to okay the Woodstock Inn’s request to knock down the homes, which the inn owns. Inn spokesperson Ben Pauly told the board they were “no longer economically viable for commercial use,” and that the inn plans to convert the land into green space. “I feel let down by The Inn,” the head of the village historic preservation committee told the board. “While the Woodstock Inn may have no use for these two homes, does that mean they should be torn down?”
Guess how many wild bee species there are in VT. We’ll get to that in a minute, but the Vermont Center for Ecostudies’ Kent McFarland and Spencer Hardy, along with over 2,500 community volunteers, searched across the state and combed through museum and private collections to amass a database of over 79,000 individual “encounters” with wild bees. Hardy and McFarland have just published a new study based on that work to update the last such study, in 1962, which found 98 species. This one found a lot more, including nine species that had never before been reported in New England. In fact, in all, they found 352 wild bee species. VCE’s writeup at the link.
SPONSORED: Lebanon Opera House is proud to present a can't-miss concert with Flamy Grant! Join us on Thursday, November 6 at 7:30 PM for a performance by the hip-shakin’, country music-makin’ drag queen. This intimate LOH on Location event at First Congregational Church of Lebanon showcases Flamy’s big voice and even bigger personality. Expect an evening filled with folk, gospel, and roots music that speaks to Flamy’s queer spiritual journey. Sponsored by the Lebanon Opera House.
A child prodigy from Hanover gets a musical. Barbara Newhall Follett was born in 1914 and finished her first novel when she was 9; Knopf published a later draft when she was 12. Her second novel came out when she was 14. Eleven years later, after a fight with her husband, she “left her apartment in Brookline, Mass., with $30 in her pocket and a notebook. She was never seen or heard from again,” writes Jessica Gelt in the LA Times (just click out of all the annoying popups). Tomorrow, a musical about her gets its world premiere in LA. Gelt tells the story of Follett’s known life and writing career, and talks to the writer of the musical, “Perfect World”, about it all.
Missed BarnArts’ Haunted Village Theater last weekend? Well, as it happens, Seven Days multimedia producer Eva Sollberger was there with her camera as audiences trooped around Barnard. As BarnArts’ Linda Treash tells her, it began in 2021 as a way to keep theater alive, outdoors, during the pandemic. This was the third time around (they do it every other year), with everything from a number from Phantom of the Opera to a ghost in petticoats, a coffin maker, and the Lady of Silver Lake.
“When I paint a lake, it could be a lake anywhere. I would say it’s always my imagination.” That’s Hanover artist Patrick Dunfey, whose first solo show since 2019, “New Paintings”, recently opened at AVA Gallery, talking to the VN’s Marion Umpleby. The former head of exhibitions design and planning at the Hood, Dunfey doesn’t call himself a landscape painter, and often he zeroes in on a particular focus. “When I first saw the pieces at AVA,” writes Umpleby, “they struck me as a version of landscape painting that skipped the sentimentality that seems endemic to the genre.” She talks to Dunfey about how he works—and why.
Hiking Close to Home: Union Village Dam, Thetford VT. Really, it’s close to home. This week the Upper Valley Trails Alliance takes us to a hike right in our backyard that's perfect for late fall. The dam road is mostly flat and excellent for walking, biking, or snowshoeing. Two trail networks branch off the road: the Mystery Trail, an interpretive path that passes an old mill site and pond from a former farmstead and leads to other trails from there, and the Forest Management Trail through mixed forests. The gate may be closed but it is still open for foot traffic.
Were you paying attention this week? Daybreak’s Upper Valley News Quiz has some questions for you, like: What kind of market opened recently in West Leb’s Glen Road Plaza? And where does state Sen. Larry Hart, who just announced he’s stepping down, represent? Meanwhile, you’ll find both NHPR’s New Hampshire quiz and Seven Days’ Vermont quiz at this link.
NH Exec Council votes to hold off funding indigent defense over vetting concerns. In a 3-2 vote Wednesday, the Council opted to hold off $5.5 million in funding for lawyers who represent indigent defendants after Councilor John Stephen, a Manchester Republican, questioned whether courts are truly examining defendants’ claims of being unable to afford a lawyer. “I feel like I'm just throwing away $5 million in tax payers’ [money] with no one doing any checks,” he said. Chris Keating, the state’s top administrative judge, responded he’d seen few instances of fraud, but “your point is a good one, we don’t have a system in place.” NHPR’s Todd Bookman reports.
NH ports director to plead guilty to misdemeanor charge. Geno Marconi, who’d been charged with witness tampering and falsifying physical evidence, along with violating the Driver Privacy Act for sharing confidential vehicle and boating license information, filed notice yesterday that he’ll plead to that last charge in exchange for the rest being dropped. He’ll get a suspended 30-day jail sentence and resign his post as Port Authority director. It all “implies that maybe the prosecution didn't have as much confidence in their evidence as maybe one might have presumed initially, but it's hard to know," UNH law prof Daniel Pi tells WMUR’s Maria Wilson.
With federal rules change, telehealth “in limbo” in VT for patients on Medicare. Back before the pandemic, federal rules only allowed reimbursement to practitioners for telehealth visits related to mental health, substance use disorder, and a few other conditions. The pandemic vastly broadened telehealth’s reach, but as of Oct. 1, reports VTDigger’s Olivia Gieger, it’s contracted again for Medicare recipients—nearly a quarter of VT’s population. To be sure, BCBS and MVP are covering telehealth visits on their plans—and DHMC and UVM Health are continuing to provide telehealth services to Medicare patients and hold onto the bills, Gieger writes, “banking on the possibility that Congress will eventually act to expand the rules.” She explains what’s going on.
A circular rainbow in China; an apocalyptic dust cloud in Texas: It’s the Weather Photographer of the Year awards. Sponsored by the UK’s Royal Meteorological Society, the 2025 awards were announced yesterday, and they just confirm what Doug Miller’s photo up at the top of today’s issue suggests: It’s a dramatic world out there. Wave clouds in Czechia, ice patterns on a frozen lake in India, a thunderhead captured during a flight from DC to Orlando…
Today's Wordbreak. With a word from yesterday’s Daybreak. If you want Wordbreak all weekend long, just use the same link tomorrow and Sunday.
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HEADS UP
Check it all out in Daybreak’s Weekend Heads Up. One note: Despite what the flyer at the link for “Norman and Beatrice” on Saturday says, it’s at 3 pm, not 2 pm.
And for today...
We get a newly unearthed early take of Paul McCartney’s “I’ve Just Seen a Face” from when The Beatles were in the studio recording Help! It’s loose, a little raw, four guys just stretching out; they did three more takes, and it was the sixth that wound up on the album. That’s John Lennon at the start saying, “Lonnie’s going to regret not singing on this one,” almost certainly referring to skiffle musician Lonnie Donegan, of whom George Harrison once said, "No Lonnie Donegan, no Beatles." “I always thought it was one of Paul’s most natural songs,” Lennon told an interviewer in 1971. “That one and ‘Yesterday’ came from the same place—just him and the guitar, very direct.” Anthology 4 is due out Nov. 21.
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