GOOD MORNING, UPPER VALLEY!
Cloudy, chance of scattered showers. The low pressure bringing us today's weather is heading out, but before it does we get a cool, kinda wet day, with breezes from the northwest eventually turning southwest and temps getting into the mid 50s. The occasional reminder that there's a sun up there, but mostly cloudy throughout the day, into the mid 40s overnight.Look up! The last few days brought in a bumper crop of rainbow pics. Plus a balloon. Thank you to all of you who sent them—here's a selection...
A double rainbow late last week was not unusual for the Northeast Kingdom, Beth Kanell notes from Waterford, "but this one came with autumn leaves flying in the wind, and the setting sun striking the leaves just right!"
And Charles Koburger caught these stunning arcs over Mascoma Lake. "I did NOT crank up the vividness on my phone camera," he writes.
Meanwhile, a hot-air balloon catching the foliage near Quechee on Friday morning:
From below, by Steven Thomas;
And on the level, from Linda Milman.
With thrift shop's closure, S. Royalton losing "one-person social service agency." For the last four decades, Raelene Lemery has run the shop—most recently called the Sunshine Thrift Shop, it operates out of a back room and the basement of the former 108 Chelsea Station Restaurant. Now, reports Jim Kenyon in the Valley News, it's making way for something else—possibly a bakery and café. Lemery is 83 and, Kenyon writes, has "earned a break from the daily grind"—but with her will go decades of quietly helping locals, from groceries they can't afford to help with back taxes. Kenyon tells her story.Build more and denser housing, sure. But how are they going to get water? In Sidenote, Li Shen writes that one of the constraints on residential development in a town like Thetford is the water supply. Though there are water systems serving its villages, they rely on narrow pipes and homes with cisterns, which state regs no longer allow. Instead, the state calls for installing water mains. Which is fine for a town with a single center, but much tougher in a place like Thetford, which is spread out; the cost of installing water mains, even shared between, say, East and North Thetford, "would be very steep," Li writes.“These are people that lived in, loved and helped build our town.” That's Hartford's Mary Kay Brown talking to the VN's Liz Sauchelli about the effort to put up a monument to town residents who served in World Wars I and II; the foundation, Sauchelli writes, is scheduled to be poured this week. She looks into the background—two earlier monuments were destroyed—and details efforts to track down the names of vets from the earlier monuments, draft records, newspaper archives, and the like. In all, there are about 292 names of people who served in WWI, 714 for WWII.They get 'em while they're young. In addition to its officers, NH Fish & Game maintains a K9 unit of "highly trained dogs and their Game Warden handlers who solve crimes, search for lost hikers, and help keep our wild lands and the people who enjoy them safe." They've just added a new member, a brown lab puppy named K9 Aspen. Oh, and in honor of the occasion the Wildlife Heritage Foundation has launched a K9 Teams popup store until mid-November. But it's definitely playing second fiddle: As one commenter on the announcement says, "I’ll take one K9 Aspen, please. Any size will do.""My hope is that the future of journalism in New Hampshire has vibrant for-profit and vibrant nonprofit outlets competing, but in a friendly sort of way..." That's the Boston Globe's Steven Porter talking to the Laconia Daily Sun's Adam Drapcho and Julie Hirshan Hart for the launch of season 2 of The Granite Beat, Hart and Drapcho's conversations with the journalists who cover New Hampshire. Porter got to his perch after a stint at USA Today and then launching his own newsletter about NH politics, which brought him to the Globe's attention. You should check out Season 1 here: lots of great interviews.Here's one thing you can do with all those gourds. Down in Hinsdale, NH, right along the border with Massachusetts, Patterson farm builds what the Keene Sentinel's Trisha Nail calls a "walkthrough palace of pumpkins" out of steel beams, chicken wire, corn husks, and pumpkins—lots and lots of them. The farm is a pumpkin wholesaler and grows 40 varieties—with a wide array of shapes, sizes, and colors, judging from the pumpkin house photo. Also: a pumpkin cannon using 6-inch sugar pumpkins. "I think people are surprised, when we fire it off for the first time, at just how fast and certainly how far those pumpkins are going," says Max Patterson.Louise Glück, former VT poet laureate, dies at 80. Calling her the state's former laureate is just a nod to parochialism: Glück won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2020, the Pulitzer in poetry, a variety of national awards, and was "widely considered to be among the country’s greatest living poets," the NYT noted in its obit (gift link). Still, as Kevin O'Connor writes in VTDigger (burgundy link), it was her arrival at Goddard College in 1971 that helped Glück find her voice. "It was one of the most dramatic, transformative experiences of my life," she once said. "I started writing with a fluency that I had never experienced.”To keep trucks from getting stuck in Smugglers Notch, VTrans plans to get them stuck before they arrive there. A "chicane" is a sharp curve in a road added as a design element rather than imposed by nature. And after this winter, reports Aaron Calvin in the Morrisville News & Citizen, VTrans intends to put up a series of moveable barriers "intended to mimic the constricting nature of the boulders that ensnare any tractor-trailer trucks" that venture into the Notch, on both the Stowe and Cambridge ends of the road. The hope is that truck drivers will stop, but if they get stuck, traffic can be routed around them.Squib of fire. Though really, it was cloudy enough Saturday afternoon that if you noticed the very partial eclipse of the sun at all, you were lucky. Much farther west, though, the annular eclipse was in its full "ring of fire" glory, and USA Today has rounded up some glorious photos from luckier parts.The Monday Vordle. With a word from Friday's Daybreak.
Bringing us into the week...
Singer-songwriter David Francey, who spent his childhood in Scotland, worked in Canada's rail yards and in the Yukon before—at age 45—turning the songs he'd been writing in his head into a music career, becoming "one of Canada's most revered folk poets and singers," the
Toronto Star
once wrote. His new album,
the breath between
, came out last month.
And
See you tomorrow.
Written and published by Rob Gurwitt Writer/editor: Jonea Gurwitt Poetry editor: Michael Lipson About Rob About Michael
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