Daybreak Monday, 1/5/26

Ready…?

Maybe a little sun at some point, probably some snow later. After starting the day under an Arctic high, we’ll see clouds build in ahead of a weak system slated to meander through, dropping some fluff. Highs today approaching 20, with tonight’s lows—given the clouds—only in the mid teens. Calm winds all day.

Moonshadows. Or “a dance of umbra and penumbra,” as David Goudy puts it. Whatever… it’s been spectacular out there in the nighttime cold.

Heads up: Main Street in West Leb down to one alternating lane starting today. Crews are doing work on the city’s sewer system, and today through Friday, Jan. 16, the city says in its press release, traffic “will be reduced to one lane with alternating traffic during daytime hours.”

And speaking of one lane of traffic: Southbound I-91 past the Fairlee cliffs will remain a single lane for a few more weeks. VTrans officials had planned on reopening the lane closest to the cliffs by mid-December, but winter weather has slowed down the ongoing work of stabilizing and sheathing the cliffs in wire mesh, reports Liz Sauchelli in the Valley News. “It’s run a little bit longer, but they’re finishing up the last items and should hopefully open back up to two lanes very soon,” VT Agency of Transportation project manager Bruce Martin tells Sauchelli.

Upper Pass leaving Tunbridge, moving to Burlington. “Well, the cat’s out of the bag,” managing partners Ivan Tomek and Chris Perry wrote on the popular brewery’s FB page yesterday after Seven Days’ Jordan Barry broke the news (burgundy link). Perry tells her that the microbrewery, which got its start in his Tunbridge farmhouse in 2015, has been looking for ways to expand for several years. “We saw how the market was changing,” he says. “Instead of doing a big production factory, we thought, Maybe it will be nice to have a community brewpub.” They found a spot in Burlington’s New North End, where Simple Roots Brewing just closed its taproom and production space.

Molly’s owner takes over former Dunk’s spot in Hanover, names it for Buddy Teevens. Buddy T’s Grill and Sports Bar will be a collaboration between Jennifer Packard and Molly’s chef Ryan O’Day, reports Marion Umpleby in the VN. It’s slated to open this month, and will feature photos and memorabilia from the late Dartmouth football coach’s life donated by his wife Kirsten and former athletes and coaches. “I think it’s going to be a real celebration of Dartmouth sports and beyond,” says Kirsten Teevens. O’Day “plans to split his time between the kitchens at Buddy T’s and Molly’s, which are located about a football field’s length from each other,” writes Umpleby.

Woodstove fire destroys Orange artist’s home; community rallies. Last Tuesday night, reports the VN’s Alex Ebrahimi, Gary Hamel woke up to stoke the stove “and saw the glow between the chimney and the wall,” as he puts it. One of the Upper Valley’s best-known artists, Hamel has lived in the Tuttle Hill Road home much of his life; his studio, holding most of his work, is down the road on Route 4 and was untouched—and his extensive art collection, which “includes work by other artists, ranging from close friends in the Upper Valley to a Matisse and a slew of Hiroshige prints,” was mostly safe, but the home is uninhabitable. As Hamel stays with a friend, a GoFundMe page organized by Canaan’s Ashley Mills has raised nearly $50,000 to help him.

In a Corinth studio, bringing stained-glass windows back to life. That restoration work for churches and community halls is Kathy Chapman’s “bread and butter,” she tells Amelia Cunningham of UVM’s Community News Service—and part of a larger practice that includes both painting and custom stained glass work. “While painting gives Chapman a sense of creative freedom, stained glass forces her to slow down and really think about each piece,” Cunningham writes in her profile of the artist. “Stained glass is a real process art,” Chapman says. “You’ve got to make a map, you want to make sure everything is the best it can be before you assemble it.” 

You can easily find where Canaan, Enfield, Hanover, and Lebanon meet on a map. But it’s wrong. Four years ago, Dan Himmelstein writes on his blog, he and his wife set out to find the spot—and came up empty-handed. So last summer, they tried again—only this time, they were using Kurt Gotthardt’s A History of Enfield Town Lines: From 1761 to 2007, which had the precise coordinates—because Gotthardt had taken the trouble to “perambulate” the town’s lines, as required by NH law. The actual four corners is some 500 feet away from where it’s shown on maps, which are all based on a mistaken 1927 USGS topo map. Himmelstein explains the history and the saga.

Finches irrupting. As VT Public’s Zoe McDonald explains, an irruption “is when large numbers of birds migrate beyond their normal range.” For finches, it happens when a poor food crop in Canada’s boreal forest sends them southward in winter looking for richer pickings—which, the Finch Research Network, says is happening this year. The VT Center for Ecostudies’ Michael Hall says you’ll find different species in different spots: pine grosbeaks and bohemian waxwings in fruit trees like crabapples, for instance, while redpolls gather in larger groups, often in fallow fields.

The Monday Jigsaw goes far afield. To Kansas, no less, with a photo of a reunion of early settlers of Lawrence, KS, who’d moved there—many from Vermont—as part of the New England Emigrant Aid Society’s effort to seed the state with abolitionists in the years before the Civil War. On his Curioustorian blog, the Norwich Historical Society’s Cam Cross explains the background.

Today's Wordbreak. With a word from a recent regional news story. Back to words from Daybreak starting tomorrow. And for all you newcomers: Wordbreak is a daily feature along the lines of the NYT’s Wordle, only with five-letter words plucked from the previous day’s Daybreak. The weekly jigsaw puzzle (usually of a local scene) runs on Mondays, crossword maestro Laura Braunstein’s mini- and midi-crosswords run on Tuesdays and Thursdays, and the weekly news quiz runs on Fridays. Check ‘em out!

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We’ll stay local, with one of the latest in Chad Finer’s ongoing “Music in the Upper Valley” series of videos: local accordion great Jeremiah McLane and multi-instrumentalist Owen Marshall with McLane’s surpassingly beautiful French-inspired waltzes (in 5/4, he’s careful to note), memorials to Seacoast folk guitarist David Surette and Vermont fiddler Pete Sutherland, traditional music legends who both died in 2022.

See you tomorrow.

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