Daybreak Friday, 6/26/26

No Daybreak next week. Or the following Monday, July 6. There’s one exception: This coming Monday afternoon (6/29), you’ll get a “week ahead” Heads Up in your inbox. Back as usual with the regular newsletter on Tuesday, July 7. Hope you are, too.

Kinda rainy. There’s a chance of showers throughout the day, with possible thunderstorms until this evening, too. This is all thanks to a cold front coming in on the heels of yesterday’s warm front. Mostly cloudy, highs in the mid or upper 70s, any rain ending tonight and lows in the mid 50s.

Raccoons see with their hands. “Touch,” writes Ted Levin about Erin Donahue’s trail cam video, “matters more than smell, sight, or hearing. Three-quarters of the brain glows with signals from the long, sinuous fingers of its forepaws. Those fingers read the world—texture, shape, and temperature—even on the darkest night. A raccoon carries more nerve endings in its fingers than a bobcat holds in its entire foreleg—in fact, it packs more receptor cells than any other mammal except primates. Raccoons don’t wash food; their soft fingers coax out more secret details. As the ground warms, beetle larvae creep toward the surface to feed on tender roots. Raccoons are waiting.”

Out in the fields… “This moment is so fleeting,” writes Edgewater Farm’s Jenny Sprague on the farm’s blog. “It's the best time of year when the sun hardly sets, the field smells like jam and we are just swimming in garlic scapes.” Which is why home chef and Kitchen Sense newsletter writer Mitchell Davis has not one, but two garlic scape recipes this week: one for braised garlic scapes, inspired by a version he once had in a Roman trattoria, and another for garlic scape pesto, good on pretty much anything (well, maybe not ice cream…)

Are Noah Kahan fans stealing road signs in Strafford? The selectboard thinks so—and so, notably, does Kahan’s mom. “Another Alger Brook Road sign has been stolen,” writes John Freitag in his town writeup for The Herald. Why? Past Alger Brook Road, I'm over the bridge/A minute from home, but I feel so far from it…Kahan sings in “The View Between Villages.” His mom has offered to pay to replace the sign, and also says she’s asking Noah to “post something asking his fans to knock it off.” Kahan fans “are frequent visitors to Strafford…and most all are very respectful and fun for residents (especially Melvin Coburn) to interact with,” Freitag notes.

End of a planning era in Hartford. Lori Hirshfield, the town’s longtime planning director, and Matt Osborn, Hartford’s nearly as longtime community development planner, are both retiring, reports Sofia Langlois in the Valley News. They’ve been guiding development issues in the town for three decades—“a luxury that not many towns can have these days,” Town Manager John Haverstock tells Langlois. Downtown WRJ in particular has changed under their tenure: “I started working for the town in September of 1997 and on my first day of work I walked downtown at lunch and it was dead,” Osborn says. Langlois describes some of the work behind the transformation.

SPONSORED: Explore America’s Sestercentennial at the Hood Museum. This Wednesday, July 1, from 12:30–1:30pm, Hood curators will co-lead an exploration of some of the museum’s exhibitions and key themes highlighting the 250th anniversary of the United States. Drawing upon the museum's collection of art and material culture, these exhibitions explore a range of subjects from sociological concerns such as immigration, labor, and revolution to art historical topics such as abstraction and Pop art. Please gather in Russo Atrium at least 5 minutes prior to the tour. No registration is necessary, but space is limited. Sponsored by the Hood Museum.

Lots of ways to move at The Junction Dance Festival. When Ann Bosse moved to VT in 2022 intending to leave dance behind, she found "this incredible dance scene" here. Four years later, she’s performing in the upcoming festival with the dance company she founded with a neighbor. TJDF, now in its fifth year, offers performances and an eclectic array of free workshops: breakdancing, tap, whack punk pose, reggaeton, bharatanatyam mudras, and even sign language storytelling, among others. This year's iteration follows the closing of some key dance studios in the region, festival director Calvin Walker tells Armita Mirkarimi in the Standard, so he hopes the festival, which runs July 10-19, will help "close that gap."

How do you draw someone’s face when you have no idea what she looked like? That was just one of the challenges confronting Norwich cartoonist Tillie Walden as she set out to create Charity & Sylvia, her new book about a lesbian couple in Weybridge, VT in the first half of the 19th century. In a conversation with David Goodman for The Vermont Conversation, she tells him she used a portrait of Charity Bryant’s brother (they looked alike) and a photo of Sylvia Drake’s niece. As for the people around them? “I really did just look at my neighbors and I drew their faces and their bodies and their personalities into the book,” she says. Lots more at the link.

SPONSORED: Join Willing Hands as a volunteer this growing season! Willing Hands gardens are growing strong. It's a wonderful time to get your hands dirty growing food for our community. Join us Saturday, 6/27, 9 AM for a garden session in Willing Hands’ Sunny Fields Garden just down the road from Cedar Circle Farm in East Thetford. And you can find plenty of other session times and sign up at the burgundy link or here. Sponsored by Willing Hands.

“We all can learn a lot from [loons] if we just sit there long enough.” On the anniversary of their brother’s death while kayaking on Sherman Reservoir, which straddles the VT/MA line, Erica Houskeeper and her sisters visited the reservoir and heard a loon calling in the distance. “That call has stayed with me,” Erica says in her new Happy Vermont podcast—so she set out to learn about their revival in the state and the ongoing challenges they face. She spent time out on the water with the VT Center for Ecostudies’ Eric Hanson and Eloise Girard—and they told her about loon behavior, what each of the different calls mean, and plenty more. Lots of loon calls…

SPONSORED: Here's your chance to own a magnificent mini work of art and support the Justin Morrill State Historic Site! Join the Friends of the Morrill Homestead on July 3rd, 5:00-7:00pm at an opening reception for "Minis for Morrill," an auction of over fifty 4"x4" paintings donated by local artists at the Morrill Homestead in Strafford, VT. Opening reception will be at the historic site near the Ice House with the exhibit in the Education Center. Online bidding runs from July 3-10. And check out the varied collection of art around the theme “Resilience" at the burgundy link or here. Sponsored by Friends of the Morrill Homestead.

This week in the woods: Slow turtles, swift foxes, and damselflies in the air. In the last week of June, painted turtles are laying eggs in the sand, writes Northern Woodlands’ Jack Saul, up to a mile away from the water. The temperature—driven by the weather and exposure—determines the babies’ sex. Gray fox parents, usually nocturnal, are busy hunting for growing kits, so you have a better chance of seeing them in daylight than at other times of the year. Look up to see the ebony jewelwing damselfly; their eyes, “perched on short stalks that remain separate from one another,” are one thing that makes them different from dragonflies. 

Hiking Close to Home: Happy Hill/AT/Cossingham Road Loop, Norwich. This loop trail links an old woods road that was once the Appalachian Trail to the current AT and to privately conserved land, says the Upper Valley Trails Alliance. You can visit the stone Happy Hill Shelter, walk through the beautiful Cossingham pastures, and experience hiking a portion of the Appalachian Trail right in Norwich. Two notes: Please keep pets leashed while walking through the Cossingham pastures, and please don’t block any driveways when parking on Happy Hill Road.

Daybreak’s Upper Valley News Quiz. Were you paying attention this week? Because we’ve got questions! Like, what unusual water sport did people recently get to try out at Thetford’s Treasure Island? Just how long is the proposed $2.9 million extension to the Mascoma River Greenway in Lebanon? You’ll find those and more at the link. Meanwhile, here’s NHPR’s New Hampshire quiz, while Seven Days’ Vermont quiz is here.

E. Corinth filmmaker launches effort to stoke VT’s film industry. Brian Carroll, who runs an online database aimed at connecting film-industry pros in the state, was also a videographer for Beetlejuice Beetlejuice when filming set up in his town. And in Seven Days, Cecilia Luce writes that the experience brought home to him “that while many films are set in Vermont, very few locals actually have a role in their creation.” So he’s set out to change that, setting up a program to award $50,000 in $5K or $10K blocksa fewlocal film productions. “Not every filmmaker or creative lives in Chittenden County or in Montpelier,” he says. “There’s hundreds of us in all the nooks and crannies and hills and valleys of the state.”

Looks like Corbin Park’s got nothing on a game preserve in the Texas Hill Country. The private game preserve in the Croydon/Cornish area has been known to lose the occasional wild boar and bison. But the Cedar Hollow Ranch in Leakey, TX, can beat that. It’s lost Gracie, a giraffe, who arrived there in May and—it’s not quite clear how—managed to wander off into the surrounding Hill Country almost two weeks ago. They’ve searched for her by helicopter, offered a $5K reward, but so far, other than one trail cam appearance, there’s been no sight of her. “There’s a lot of food out there for her to eat,” says the ranch manager. “There’s plenty of water.”

Today's Wordbreak. With a word from yesterday’s Daybreak.

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HEADS UP

There’s an incredible amount happening this weekend all around the Upper Valley. You can check it all out at the Weekend Heads Up. And one more thing to know about: The West Windsor Music Festival, which you read about in Daybreak earlier this week, is tonight, tomorrow, and Sunday, with pianists Sakiko Ohashi and Orli Shaham, the Salix Piano Trio, and violinist Helen Kim. Details here.

And for today...

This is kind of a New Year’s song, by the great French troubadour Christophe Maé, but heck, we’re almost halfway to the end of the year so why not listen to it now? “Fête Foraine” is the title piece from his latest album, with a brassy, jaunty look not just at the passage of time, but at the pleasures of life in a lower key. “It's not a fairground,” he sings. “It's not a Ferris wheel / My life, I love it anyway…”

See you July 7. Have a fantastic time until then!

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Written and published by Rob Gurwitt      Poetry editor: Michael Lipson    Associate Editors: Jonea Gurwitt, Sam Gurwitt

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