Daybreak Monday 10/12/20

WELCOME TO THE WEEK, UPPER VALLEY!

Sunny, fall-like. We're in this zone of high pressure today, but weather's on its way. Mostly sun for the bulk of the day, highs in the mid-50s, winds from the southeast. But then let's just quote the weather folks about tonight: "Deformation in the flow finally allows remnant moisture from former Hurricane Delta to lift into the North Country." Mostly this matters for tomorrow, but together with an approaching cold front, it means a healthy rain showing up overnight. Down to the mid-40s tonight.You know that brilliant light we get in the fall? Lisa Lacasse wandered out with her coffee the other morning in Quechee to take it in... and immediately rushed back inside to grab her camera. You can see why. And this was one lucky bit of timing. The sun just after it had risen above the distant hills yesterday morning and just before it disappeared into the early-morning cloud layer, the trees radiant in its light. A still from William Daugherty's drone over Plainfield. Hanover schools see Covid cases. After announcing a case Friday at the Ray Elementary School, on Saturday the district followed up with an email alerting families to a positive case at the Richmond Middle School. It noted that the state health department is looking into whether the two cases are part of a cluster. On top of Lebanon high and middle schools, and schools in Sunapee and Hartford, this bring to six the number of Upper Valley schools with reported cases. (Valley News)Leb Mall construction robs Shoeshine Guy of a venue, so now he's offering pickup service. For the last five springs and summers, the retired lawyer known as the Shoeshine Guy set up on Wednesdays outside Hanover Park (where the Skinny P used to be), polishing shoes, meeting people... and donating all the proceeds to charity. He'd planned to move to the Lebanon Mall this year, with his earnings going to the Ledyard Charter School, but lost the summer to construction. Now, for the fall, he's decided to do pickup service in exchange for a contribution to the school. His letter at the link.Enfield Farmers Market vendor tests positive, vends anyway. On Saturday, the town wrote on its official Facebook page, "Town officials and organizers of the Enfield Market received reports that a vendor participating in the market had tested positive for COVID-19 within the last 24 hours. The vendor, Whiskey Kissed Co., departed the market immediately at the request of the market"—though not before spending two hours at the Huse Park market. Officials are working with the state health department on "next steps" for contact tracing and possible quarantine alerts to anyone in close contact with the vendor.Dirt Cowboy in the black thanks to online coffee-bean sales. The VN's John Lippman has a rare good-news pandemic story. “For two years I had put every one of my own paychecks back into the place to keep it running,” owner Tom Guerra tells him. “As soon as the pandemic struck, that stopped." The reason: He cut staff costs and pivoted to selling roasted coffee beans online, with the help of a Dartmouth alum in California and the patronage of Dartmouth alums all over. It's still a café, but the beans have helped a lot.SPONSORED: Two Weeks Left to See It's Fine, I'm Fine at Northern Stage. The play follows a young woman as she comes to grips with a new normal after giving up varsity soccer at Dartmouth after a series of concussions. It advocates for compassion in the face of our invisible struggles. Social distancing, masks, and health screening in place, along with updates to HVAC systems and weekly COVID testing for artists to make this experience as safe as possible for all. Sponsored by Northern Stage."If I'm thinking about this going out to 7,000 people, I would never hit 'Send'....So in my mind I'm still just writing to friends.” That's, well, me. Talking to NHPR's Sean Hurley for a profile he's just done of Daybreak. Hurley's not a breaking-news kind of guy; he's a thorough, insightful interviewer and the radio equivalent of a magazine feature writer. It was a treat. And yes: He sounds like that in person, too. A big welcome to all the Granite Staters who've subscribed as a result. One other thing. In that interview I mention newspaper owners sucking the liveliness out of too many publications. This was aimed at industry trends, not the Valley News, whose reporters and editors, despite the paper's struggles, still manage each day to put out a cornerstone publication for the Upper Valley. Same goes for the Monitor, Seven Days, VTDigger, and the other Twin State newsrooms Daybreak relies on every day. We're very lucky.Ever heard of the cowpea mosaic virus? Me neither. It's a pathogen that infects cowpea plants, the source of black-eyed peas. And Jack Hoopes, a veterinary radiation specialist at Dartmouth's Geisel and Thayer schools, is using a treatment derived from the virus in dogs with a common mouth cancer, with promising results. Turns out the virus is more effective than others at triggering an immune response that also kills the cancer. It's based on research into plant viruses being led in part by Steve Fiering, a Norris Cotton Cancer Center immunologist. Wired's Daniel Oberhaus goes into the details.Dartmouth swim teams turn to the feds. As you know, the men's and women's swimming and diving teams were cut by the college back in July. Now, reports the Union Leader, captains Margaret Deppe-Walker and Brandon Liao have written to Ed Secy Betsy DeVos noting that the college has not yet responded to their request for the metrics, internal correspondence, and findings of fact that went into the decision to "determine if the discriminatory outcome toward Asian student athletes that resulted was intentional." "We all grew up with the adage, 'Crime doesn't pay.'  Unfortunately, [we're likely to see] an increase in the number of folks who are testing that adage." Fairlee Selectboard member Peter Berger writes in response to Friday's item about the vandalism at South End Auto in Randolph. As the economy continues to struggle, he suggests, towns and states have to deal with "what it means to parts of our society that have had their lives turned upside down and are economically exposed, with little to do to remedy it since our government is not—at this point—one of the solutions."NH, only state lacking a vaccination registry, aims to build one in time for Covid vaccine. The system, a state health department spokesman tells the Union Leader's Shawne K. Wickham, "will include information on the availability of COVID-19 vaccines, ordering information, and a component where residents can make sure they are up to date on their COVID-19 vaccination.” Wickham also talked to DHMC's Dr. Antonia Altomare, who says the hospital plans a reprise of its remarkably efficient drive-thru flu vaccine clinics when the time comes for a Covid vaccine.Hey, you can now sign up for a VT drivers license in Burmese! Thanks to state laws passed last year and this, all written forms and applications used for licensing have to be translated into the top primary languages spoken in Vermont, in addition to English. So the DMV has translated its forms into Arabic, Bosnian/Serbian/Croatian, Burmese, French, Kirundi, Nepali, Somali, Spanish, and Swahili. In addition, an interpreter will be available for road tests, starting in S. Burlington and expanding elsewhere as needed.Could pandemic-era online learning help revive Abenaki language? That hope comes from a two-week immersion course in the language hosted by Middlebury College this summer, with 20 students enrolled. “That’s the most exciting thing,” one of the teachers, Jesse Bruchac, tells VTDigger's Amanda Gokee. “We have people from all the Abenaki communities from Canada and the U.S., all over New England, several joining us from California, from overseas, from Europe.” As they teach, Gokee reports, instructors are creating resources "they hope will be available to learners for generations to come."“A walk in an old-growth forest is really a clamber." Donald MacGillis was writing about a hike in VT when he put down those words in 2002, but it could just as easily have been NH. Uprooted trees, he explained, create pits and mounds when they fall, "wordless headstones that remain centuries after the fallen tree itself has become an indistinguishable part of the forest floor.” MacGillis, a longtime editorialist and essayist at the Boston Globe, died after a fall off Mt. Katahdin's Knife Edge last week. The Globe's Bryan Marquard has an appreciation of his "crisp, graceful writing as bracing as mountain air.""I think resiliency is just hard-wired into our DNA." That's one of the themes Margaret Caulfield, director of the Cavendish Historical Society, takes from the story of Phineas Gage, who lived 11 years after an 1848 accident sent a 3-foot steel rod through his skull. The incident "changed the history of brain science," notes Steve Paulson, the producer of To The Best of Our Knowledge, the public radio show. Over the years, he says, the story has been seen as a survival story, a "textbook case" of post-traumatic personality change, and, now, an example of the brain's ability to overcome trauma.There's huge pleasure in watching a master craftsperson at work. Eater's been doing a series of videos profiling the people who make beautiful objects that figure in some way on a dining table. Here, Charleston, SC woodturner Ashley Harwood shows what goes into the yearlong process of making wooden bowls from the trunks and limbs of downed live oak, magnolia, and hickory trees she's found. (Thanks, AS!)

Let's catch up...

News that connects you. If you like Daybreak and want to help it keep going, here's how:

Let's ease into the week today. Elise LeGrow, the stylish and spellbinding Toronto singer "with just a hint of sandpaper grit in a voice that could only belong to a star," as the TED folks once put it,

See you tomorrow.

Written and published by Rob Gurwitt         Banner by Tom Haushalter    Poetry editor: Michael Lipson  About Rob                                                    About Tom                             About Michael

And if you think one or more of your friends would like Daybreak, too, please forward this newsletter and tell them to hit the blue "Subscribe" button below. And thanks! And hey, if you're that friend? So nice to see you! You can subscribe at: 

Thank you!