GOOD MORNING, UPPER VALLEY!
Cloudy to start, sun eventually. We're kind of betwixt and between today, as the low-pressure system that brought us last night's weather moves off... but there's still a slight chance of snow first thing and the clouds will diminish only gradually. High today in the lower 30s, winds from the north and northwest, down into the mid-teens overnight.After the storm... Remember the still, sharp air and that calm, pastel sky toward sunset after things had settled down over the weekend? Here's what it looked like in Meriden, NH, by Janice Fischel.As inflation hits, food shelves step up efforts. "Everything is up, so I think maybe more folks that were on the cusp...[are] needing more assistance,” Eula Kozma, director of the Friends of Mascoma Foundation, tells the Valley News's Liz Sauchelli. The Haven's anticipating rising need, too, and the Church of Christ at Dartmouth College's food pantry has been seeing regular stop-ins when it's open each Saturday, including community members and grad students. “There’s food insecurity everywhere,” says associate pastor Rob Grabill. “What’s nice is the stigma is eroding. If you need food, you need food.”Well, now, this could get interesting. You may remember that back in October, VT's District 3 Environmental Commission denied an act 250 permit to Boston developer John Holland and his plans to create an 80-seat farm-to-table restaurant at his Peace Field Farm in Woodstock. Now, however, in a 3-2 vote Woodstock's Development Review Board has approved the restaurant as an “accessory on-farm business" under a different state statute, Act 143, reports the VT Standard. The act allows farmers to diversify and open their doors to the public in order to sustain a working farm."We remember you, your kids, and your dog." On her Artful blog, Susan Apel catches up with Sam Kass and Emma Nichols, who took over the Norwich Bookstore this year. They've been making some changes, she writes: a revamped website, new sections for romance, graphic novels, science fiction, expanded shelf space for woodworking and music. But what hasn't changed, Kass tells her, is the bookstore's role as community anchor.Natural floodplains are almost non-existent in today’s Vermont. And so, writes Li Shen in Sidenote, are the birds that breed in their "magnificent" forests. Now, though, there's an effort in Post Mills to restore the Taylor Floodplain Preserve on the Ompompanoosuc River. Until this fall, Shen writes, it was a mess, overrun with invasives. But thanks to efforts by a wide range of players, including Tim and Janet Taylor of Crossroad Farm, abutting landowners, consulting forester Ehrhard Frost, and others, 817 native trees and shrubs were planted there last month.Hartford to take up demolition request on Gates St. buildings. There are interesting forces at play in Ken Parker's bid to tear down the 1880s house and adjacent barn that once housed his insurance agency. Preservationists see a threat to downtown WRJ's past. Parker thinks it's not feasible to repair the buildings and, writes the Valley News's Jim Kenyon, has given first dibs on the land to Northern Stage, which needs housing for staff and actors. Then there's Kenyon himself, who plants his thumb on the scale against razing the buildings.“The culture wars are alive and well. They’re just at a low simmer compared to other places.” That's Jay Badams, superintendent of the Dresden School District, talking to VTDigger's Lola Duffort about public controversy over efforts in schools to teach that racism can be embedded in laws and institutions, not just an individual flaw. The national focus on the question, Duffort writes, has mobilized some parents in both VT and NH—including a public records request that's costing Badams several hours a week sifting through potentially 350,000 emails related to diversity and equity.Contact tracing in the NH State House? It's a game of telephone. Recently, an advocate who'd attended an in-person hearing learned she'd been exposed to Covid only after a lawmaker told a lobbyist who told another lobbyist who told her. "At no point was the news of the...exposure in the committee hearing distributed to the public," NH Bulletin's Ethan DeWitt writes. House leadership does let legislators know, but advocates are arguing it needs to find a way to notify attendees of hearings—and take stronger steps to keep legislators who have coughs from showing up to hearings without masks."Depackaging" plant recycles more food waste—but may also be lacing VT ag fields with microplastics. Casella's $3 million plant went online last January and has been a ready recipient of unsellable packaged foods and beverages—from producers like Ben & Jerry's and from supermarkets—that are barred from the state's landfill. There, writes Seven Days' Kevin McCallum, the packaging is separated from the food, which is then shipped to biogas plants and, eventually, spread on fields. The problem: Some microplastics remain—and now state regulators are trying to figure out how much."Of course he's tired. How could he not be?" The argument in VT between the Democratic-led legislature and GOP Gov. Phil Scott over how to respond to the ongoing Covid surge doesn't mean that legislative leaders have parked their humanity at the soundbite door. That's Senate Pres. Becca Balint talking to The Atlantic's Russell Berman, who back in the spring was chronicling the state's nation-leading model behavior and, now, is back to point out that it's losing its luster. "If Vermont has finally lost control of the pandemic," he asks, "what chance is there for the rest of the country?"New Hampshire has a state dog. New York has a state dog. But Vermont? NH's is the Chinook, the sled dog first bred in the state. NY's is "the working dog," from therapy to police to seeing-eye dogs. VT legislators, meanwhile, have made two attempts to name one, writes Lilly St. Angelo in the Burlington Free Press, but keep coming up short. Both efforts got going in 2015, when one lawmaker proposed the beagle—which a petition labeled "very loyal and hardworking, just like Vermonters." Another followed a few months later with "the rescue dog." Neither bill went anywhere. So hey, the slot's open.Okay, equal time: It starts with a single cat. Lapping milk. In finger-tapping rhythm. After a moment, Uzbeki musician Sherzod Ergashev joins in, followed by Norwegian drummer Harry André Hansen, then a couple of horn players, then keyboardists, a bass player, an accordionist, some singers, more horn players... As one commenter says of Ergashev's viral two-minute video, "Every once in a while the classic Internet shines through and takes us back to better times..."Daybreak doesn't get to exist without your support. Help it keep going by hitting the maroon button:
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Daybreak Where You Are: The Album. Photos of daybreak around the Upper Valley, Vermont, New Hampshire, and the US, sent in by readers.
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