GOOD MORNING, UPPER VALLEY!
Maybe a wintry mix today. There's a storm system off the coast, and its effects could reach into eastern VT today, bringing a slight chance of snow or freezing rain or sleet or all three. Otherwise, cloudy with a high in the mid or upper 20s and winds from the north—which may get pretty gusty through the afternoon. Temps will drop just a few degrees overnight.If you use the Union Village Covered Bridge in Thetford: Just a heads up that it's closed today through Wednesday, 8:30 am to 3:30 pm, so the town can replace damaged interior timber beams.Lebanon, Hanover, Enfield, Plainfield prep to "take control of their energy source." At least, that's the goal of the Community Power Coalition of NH, based in Hanover, which builds on 2019 state legislation to pool municipalities' electricity buying power, writes Frances Mize in the Valley News. The idea is both to keep rates down for the Coalition's customers and to give them greater say in how much renewable energy feeds the mix of sources powering their homes and businesses. Hanover and Leb will launch this spring, and customers will automatically be in the program unless they opt out.Locals work to launch Windsor County NAACP branch. As of Friday, reports Nora Doyle-Burr in the VN, the group had about 70 of the 100 members needed to establish a new branch. The group's goal, say organizers Pat Autilio and Miriam Wood—both members of Hartford's racial equity committee—is to give residents a place to go if they face discrimination. “Ultimately, the goal would be for, if they did have a problem, they would have someone to talk to about it,” Wood tells Doyle-Burr. It can be “hard to go to the school administration or the town. Hopefully people will feel comfortable talking to us.”Land trust studying how animals move about the region. A moose's home range can cover up to 50 square miles, a male bobcat's 60. And even wild turkeys may need up to four square miles. But, writes Li Shen in Sidenote, their habitat is chopped up by roads, highways, rail lines, houses, and towns, and there's not much information about how animals manage to move about the Upper Valley to find food and other resources. So the Upper Valley Land Trust has launched the Wildlife Connectivity Study, using volunteers trained to look for animal tracks and signs, to start understanding the routes and obstacles.Springfield Prison survey: There's a lot of unhappiness. “The things that really stand out,” says Abigail Crocker of UVM's Justice Research Initiative, which helped with the survey, “are mental health, the physical health, social health impacts, of working or being incarcerated in a facility.” In brief: Both staff and inmates show "alarming" levels of suicidal thinking, while staff find high levels of stress and incarcerated people chafe at health staff shortages and a lack of meaningful things to do. “We put more rehabilitation into animals," one inmate's partner tells VTDigger's Alan J. Keays.“I wanted to get at the relationship between memory and reading.” Dartmouth writing prof and Enthusiasms contributor Peter Orner's new collection of brief essays, Still No Word From You, continues to attract attention in literary circles, most recently from San Francisco Chronicle reviewer L.A. Taggart. "Yearning for lost time infuses every page," Taggart writes of Orner's "meditation on storytelling"—noting that despite comparisons to Chekhov, Saul Bellow, Alice Munro, and Doris Lessing and three Pushcart Prizes, Orner "remains a literary secret."Judge lets "divisive concepts" lawsuit advance. Last week, NH Bulletin's Ethan DeWitt reported on Friday, US District Court Judge Paul Barbadoro rejected NH's attempt to throw out the suit, brought by state teachers unions and the ACLU of NH. “Given the severe consequences that teachers face if they are found to have taught or advocated a banned concept," Barbadoro wrote, the plaintiffs' claim that the law is unconstitutionally vague is plausible. He was, however, less amenable to plaintiffs' argument that the law impinges on teachers' free speech. Now the case moves on to discovery.Most VT towns need to do a reappraisal this year. The problem? Not enough appraisers. Given skyrocketing home values, something like two-thirds of the state's towns can expect an order from the Dept. of Taxes this year to reappraise their property. But, writes VTDigger's Ethan Weinstein, "where there have been an average of 16 reappraisals a year over the last decade, there simply aren’t enough appraisers to handle 165 towns." It's not just that there aren't enough firms, but some towns are abandoning elected listers in favor of assessors on contract—and there aren't enough of them, either.So hey, Upper Valley! Barstool ski races? Look, it's going to snow at some point, and when it does, maybe some enterprising local will want to look west, to Martin City, Montana. Every year it hosts Cabin Fever Days, which got its start in 1978 when one guy challenged another to put a barstool on skis and make it down the town's main drag—crossing the finish line in drinking position. These days, writes Vanita Salisbury in Thrillist, there's food, arm-wrestling tournaments, softball on snowshoes...and an "open class" barstool race, which has been won several times by a ten-foot steel Budweiser bottle on skis.The Monday Vordle. With a fine word from Friday's Daybreak.
And to start off the week...Not music, but speech. It's been close to 61 years since Martin Luther King Jr. spoke to an overflow crowd at Dartmouth Hall. It was a lecture on the state of the civil rights movement, but of course, it was also more than that. Here's a one-minute snippet from that speech, in which King invoked the then-current term in psychology, "maladjusted". "Now of course, we all want to live a well-adjusted life," he said. But "there are some things in our society and some things in our world [about] which I am proud to be maladjusted."See you tomorrow.
Written and published by Rob Gurwitt Writer: Jonea Gurwitt Poetry editor: Michael Lipson About Rob About Michael
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