GOOD MORNING, UPPER VALLEY!
Rain, maybe mixed with snow tonight. Right now we’re in a little dry pocket, but that’s likely to change by late morning or early afternoon. It’s relatively mild out this morning, and temps will get up to around 50, keeping whatever falls later as all rain through this afternoon. But colder air is arriving later—there’s actually going to be meaningful snowfall over to the west—with a switchover from rain to snow moving from west to east over the course of today and tonight, bringing a chance of snow this evening as temps drop toward the mid 20s overnight.
That’s a big nest! It was lying on a path near Lake Fairlee, writes Elizabeth Wilcox. “Beautiful and made entirely of grass. I put my foot beside it to give a sense of scale. I wonder to which bird family it might have belonged?”
Some good news for Claremont’s Stevens High. In the midst of all the turmoil over the school district’s finances, its sports teams began the fall not even sure they’d be able to play. But on Saturday in Bedford, reports Michael Coughlin Jr., the girls soccer team became NH’s Division III state champions, going 20-0 for the season and beating Raymond 1-0 on a first-half goal by Payton Ferland. The story of the game, writes Coughlin, was “the Cardinals’ defense and clutch second-half goaltending from senior Audrina Pelton,” who made key stops throughout the half.
In W. Woodstock, a retired teacher turns winter-hardy grapes into verjus. You could think of it (you’ll also see it as verjuice) as a juice that’s halfway between wine and vinegar—it’s “the non-alcoholic, tart, acidic juice pressed from unripe wine grapes,” writes Tom Ayres in the VT Standard. And since 2019, former special ed teacher Sharen Conner’s been turning grapes grown on her and her husband’s farm by the Lincoln Covered Bridge—and, more recently, from the vineyard at the Gilbert’s Hill farmstead—into the sought-after “elixir.” These days, Conner makes about 190 liters a year, selling to restaurants, her own farmstand, and the local farmers market.
How a 19th century barn became housing in Fairlee. As small-town developer Jonah Richard writes in his latest Brick + Mortar post, “The barn sits behind Chapman’s in Fairlee, the general store my cousins own and operate. It’s been in the family for four generations and my uncle once ran an antique shop out of a corner of it.” This time, Richard was the general contractor, and in the post he details the work—”Watching a 19th-century barn balanced on four stacks of wood is not something you see every day”—and the challenges. Including state regs that make VT the only New England state not to allow a septic chamber that can be installed under new parking lots.
Why cell service in Hanover sucks. Or as Lukas Dunford puts it in the VN, is so “unreliable.” The town’s actually working on it, town manager Rob Houseman tells him, but for the moment, visitors downtown are stuck without service entirely, relying on wifi calling thanks to an extension from Dartmouth, or hoping that sometime in the next few minutes their phone will load what they need. The reason: the only cell tower right in town is in the Church of Christ steeple, whose signal is blocked by nearby buildings. There are also towers at DHMC and on Moose Mountain, but their coverage radius has shrunk as new signal generations have rolled out. Dunford explains it all.
NH, VT both get November SNAP benefits out the door, but feds want them to “undo” them. It’s an ever-changing story, so who knows what will have happened by the time you read this, but… On Friday, USDA told state SNAP directors it would comply with a court order to make benefits available, and both Vermont and New Hampshire seized the moment to send the money electronically to recipients. Friday night, though, the US Supreme Court issued a stay and on Saturday, USDA directed states to “immediately undo any steps taken” to issue November benefits. At the burgundy link, an ABC News timeline of the legalities through yesterday.
Here’s Maria Wilson’s story for WMUR on the state of play in NH, where the Department of Health and Human Services said on Saturday all SNAP recipients received their full November benefit allotment on their EBT cards.
And in the Brattleboro Reformer, Chris Mays writes that on Friday, VT state Treasurer Mike Pieciak announced benefits had gone out to the 67,000 Vermonters enrolled in 3SquaresVT, the state version of the federally funded program.
“Learn from the deer.” That was what a “voice from the universe” told Deborah Lee Luskin, a transplanted New Yorker who’d spent three decades in Vermont living in fear of getting lost in the woods unless she was with her husband, who’d grown up in NH “who bushwhacked fearlessly.” Then, at age 60, Luskin took up hunting, she writes in a post on the Vermont Almanac blog. “I’ve now entered the woods before dawn and found my way out after dusk. Thanks to the deer, I’ve stopped looking for handwritten signs and have started to see the language of the forest,” she reports, spending days “as engrossed in watching the drama of the forest as I’ve been lost in good novel.”
Six hikes in VT where the views get better after the leaves fall. Erica Houskeeper rounds up a set of stick-season hikes for her Happy Vermont blog. None are around here, but they’ve all got something to offer, from the “geological gem” of the Ice Beds Trail in Wallingford to the hike along the Stimson Ridge section of the Long Trail in Bolton and the expansive views from atop the fire tower on Spruce Mountain in Groton State Forest. Erica also includes a set of safety tips for hiking during hunting season.
In search of the Tinmouth apple. It starts with a question to VT Public’s Brave Little State: What happened to the Tinmouth apple and why is it so hard to find today? In fact, one apple expert says, it’s “functionally extinct.” So Sabine Poux heads to Tinmouth, a bit south of Rutland and the home of the legendary cider apple. “In its heyday,” she reports, it was “esteemed in the Tinmouth area. And, today, it’s special in the apple world because it’s so darn hard to find.” She connects with Wheaton Squier and his dad, Marshall—who, 60 years ago, found an apple he thinks was a contender. So the three of them set off (with an old watercolor of a Tinmouth) to find a tree…
The Monday Jigsaw: Lake Hitchcock. This week’s puzzle, writes the Norwich Historical Society’s Cam Cross, “explores the ancient history of the landscape beneath our feet: the vanished Glacial Lake Hitchcock, which once filled the Connecticut River Valley.” The puzzle itself is of a map of VT with its glacial lakes, but over on his Curioustorian blog, Cam’s got a link to an interactive map that give the whole sweep of the lake and is better for exploring, as well as to a 1935 Dartmouth Alumni Mag article that points out that if the Baker Library tower had existed at the time of the lake, everything below the middle of the clock face would have been under water.
Today's Wordbreak. With a word from Friday’s Daybreak.
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It took Canadian composers Bill Brennan and Andy McNeill 25 years to make their new album, Dreaming in Gamelan. And though they use traditional Sundanese instruments hand-forged by a sought-after Javanese craftsman, it’s definitely not traditional gamelan—but nor is it really ambient, or jazz, or any other category. Talking about gamelan, McNeill—who composes for PBS, the CBC, and films—told an interviewer, “I love the clear bell-like tonalities, the deep sustaining gongs, and, of course, the unusual tunings. It's hard to describe, but I'd say there's a feeling of suspension, a kind of emotional ambiguity in this music. It's a completely refreshing sound to these ears.” Below is “Tunnels of Light”.
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