Daybreak Monday 10/9/23

GOOD MORNING, UPPER VALLEY!

Partly sunny, fall temps. There's low pressure parked off to the northeast, and it's going to keep things cool and maybe a little breezy for the next few days. More sun than clouds today (they say), temps into the mid or upper 50s, and down into the upper 30s tonight. Winds today from the south.Oh, hey, don't forget your bike! Which was parked on a handy boulder in the middle of the White River in S. Royalton last week. Kit Hood got the photo.Multi-family projects won't be open until spring, but there's already a long list of applicants. Combined, writes the Valley News's Patrick Adrian, the two Twin Pines developments—one in a former hotel on Ballardvale Drive in WRJ, the other taking shape across from the LISTEN center on the WRJ side of the bridge to West Leb—will provide 82 affordable apartments. “The first people to apply (said they) showed up at 4 a.m. and camped outside our offices, waiting for us to open,” Twin Pines executive director Andrew Winter tells Adrian.VT State Police seek info on car break-ins. A series of them occurred overnight Saturday into Sunday around the Vermont Tech campus in Randolph, the VSP says in a press release. The thief or thieves mostly took money, they report, though some car owners also lost small electronics—largely from unlocked cars, though "a couple had their windows broken." The press release adds, "The state police reminds everyone to lock their vehicles, and if valuables are kept in the vehicle, to keep them out of sight."Why there are questions about the process for hiring Norwich's town manager. You may remember that a couple of weeks ago, the selectboard moved quickly and without public input to give the job to Brennan Duffy, after he'd served less than a year as interim manager. In the VN, columnist Jim Kenyon rounds up the reasons he and some other townspeople are objecting to how the decision got made: it came after two "emergency" closed-door meetings, gives Duffy a salary roughly $40,000 higher than his predecessor's, and avoided a broader search for qualified candidates.You'll be relieved to know the border's secure. At least, the NH-VT border. On Friday, the attorneys general of VT and NH—Charity Clark and John Formella—met at the Ledyard Bridge between Hanover and Norwich for a once-every-seven-years (or, this time, 11 years) "perambulation" of the border. The tradition is required by law in both states, after US Supreme Court rulings in the '30s setting the boundary as the low-water mark on the western side of the Connecticut. The two AGs checked things out by boat and bridge, and light-heartedly razzed the other state's claims to fame. The NH AG's office explains."You can't direct buffalo with a bullhorn." That's filmmaker Ken Burns talking with The Dartmouth's Adrienne Murr about his production company's latest documentary, The American Buffalo. The film, Burns and producer Julie Dunfey tell Murr, is in part a way to look at Native American history and at the US's relationship to its own land—and also, Dunfey says, "It’s a way of looking at uppercase US, the United States, and lowercase us—who are we Americans?" They talk over what it took to make the film during the pandemic, what to do when a bison spends 15 minutes licking your camera, and more.Like being "inside an L.L. Bean balsam pillow." That's the smell inside the drying hut at the NH State Forest Nursery in Boscawen, writes Hadley Barndollar in NH Bulletin. Every year, Barndollar reports, the nursery, which is the last state-owned tree nursery in New England, grows 3 million seedlings—cedar, Douglas and Fraser firs, larch,  spicebush, and "countless other native species"—for sale to landowners and growers. The nursery's been around since 1910, when it was established to help reforest New Hampshire; it's seen a renaissance recently, selling out of every seedling it grows.Police around Castleton still on the hunt for murderer of retired VT State-Castleton dean. Honoree Fleming, a biochemist who also taught at Middlebury, was found Thursday on the Delaware & Hudson Rail Trail, about a mile south of campus, dead of a gunshot to the head. Police identified her Friday night. Fleming was married to best-selling author Ron Powers, who wrote on Facebook, "Those of you who knew her know that she was beautifully named. I have never known a more sterling heart and soul than hers." The campus will reopen today, though scheduled events have been cancelled,What it's like to learn your ancestors were enslaved by a sitting US rep's ancestors. Ever since this summer, Reuters has been running a series on the legacy of slavery in the US—including the fact that every living former (and current) US president except Donald Trump has slaveholding ancestors. Last week, it focused on two families: those of former UVM administrator Lacretia Johnson Flash and Kentucky US Rep. Brett Guthrie, and "how the descendants of the enslavers and those they enslaved have fared since emancipation." It's a complex story; in Seven Days, Mary Ann Lickteig talks to Flash about it all.Congrats, you're first trumpet! Can you cluck? Today's music is here today, because it's accompanied by this story by the Guardian's Eva Corlett. In what seems to be a world first, the New Zealand Symphony recently sat and stood—dressed in their concert finery and muck boots—at the Bostock Brothers' farm to play Hamish Oliver's Chook Symphony No. 1 for the Bostocks' chickens. It's a baroque piece—chickens seem especially responsive to baroque music, Corlett writes—that incorporates the occasional barnyard sound. Full score at the burgundy link, shorter video in the Guardian piece. (Thanks, NS!)The Monday Vordle. With a word from Friday's Daybreak.

Heads Up

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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