GOOD MORNING, UPPER VALLEY!
Mostly sunny, warmer. A clipper barrelled through overnight, dumping more snow in the mountains and a bit in the valleys, but now it's just a memory and we're at the start of a warming trend. Highs today will get into the mid 40s with winds from the west, down into the mid or upper 20s tonight.Squirrel highway to heaven? Probably not, but Carin Pratt's label for these shelf fungi in Tunbridge definitely gives you the idea.Sudden closure of W. Leb "dry bridge" was years in the making. In fact, as Clare Shanahan wrote in the Valley News over the weekend, "concerns about the integrity of the bridge along a critical artery for Upper Valley traffic date back decades." The bridge linking downtown W. Leb to the 12A strip was shut down Thursday morning after a state report deeming it unsafe for travel came back Wednesday. But as Shanahan reports, it was first flagged as in need of repair in 1998, and multiple efforts to deal with it have been delayed or sidetracked. Shanahan also details the closure's impact on businesses and services.Claremont waste fight: “If we allow stuff like this, we’re out... There’s not going to be a future here.” The proposal for a recycling facility that would get up to 500 tons a day of construction and demolition debris—near an elementary school and 400 homes—is drawing heated opposition, Claire Sullivan writes in NH Bulletin this morning. In part, she notes, resistance centers around logistics—traffic, noise, contaminants, road damage from dozens of trucks a day. But it also grows out of Claremont's long fight to rebuild itself. A state hearing Thursday drew 48 speakers against, two in favor.I-91 crash claims two lives. According to the VT State Police, Saturday's crash in Rockingham occurred after "multiple northbound vehicles were involved in minor crashes and slide-offs due to deteriorated road conditions and low visibility in a snow squall." A fuel tanker stopped because of the crashes ahead, and a Hyundai behind it with a four-member family from North Haven, CT—husband, wife, three-year-old, and infant—was unable to stop and rear-ended it. The husband died at the scene, the infant was air-lifted to DHMC, where he died. The wife and three-year-old had non-life-threatening injuries.“Mrs. C. believed in me when I felt no one else did." That was a former student's online tribute to Judy Collishaw, who taught for over two decades at Hanover's Richmond Middle School; she died last summer at 81. In the VN today, Jim Kenyon traces Collishaw's life—left in charge of her siblings while their mother worked as a custodian and office assistant at a church in the Bronx after their father's death, her 56-year marriage to fellow-teacher Bill Collishaw, their move to Lebanon (where Bill taught), and especially her life as a social studies teacher "known for tackling difficult subject matter.”Eat Vermont launches mobile app. You may remember former Hartford selectboard member Rocket (who's now adopted the name Senator Rocket) has been highlighting eateries around VT on his Eat Vermont Instagram channel. Now, reports NBC5's Anna Guber, he's got a mobile app that, as he says, puts "all the information in the food scene into one easy interface." He's also got a bigger goal in mind: food as unifier. "Okay you think this, you think that, have it out and then at the end of it...we're all going to sit down to enjoy this meal together," he tells VT Daily Chronicle's Paul Bean.The debate over the Bennington Battle Monument. “How are we going to come up with $40 million to try to patch up a water-soaked bunch of limestone?” VT Country Store owner Lyman Orton asks Greta Solsaa in VTDigger. You probably remember that the iconic monument has developed all sorts of problems thanks to the water-sucking stone from which it was built. Solsaa explores the cases being made for just tearing it down and replacing it with something maybe holographic—that's Orton—to restoring it. “If we do this correctly, we’re looking at another 100 years," says a state official.The man behind VT's design-build architecture movement: “He elevated the two-by-four and the 16-penny nail into things of great beauty." David Sellers, who, along with William Reineke, in the mid-'60s established what you might think of as an architects' commune in the Mad River Valley known as Prickly Mountain, died last month. In the NYT this weekend (gift link) Penelope Green describes his life, work (including a multi-family structure called the Dimetrodon whose design "is so idiosyncratic that it defies description"), and far-reaching influence. “His attitude was ‘Just do it. You can build anything," says one architect. "He enjoyed the challenge of a stack of plywood.”The Monday jigsaw. As the Norwich Historical Society's Cam Cross writes, "Dirt roads are ubiquitous hereabouts. We had a preview this week of the big mud to come. Imagine how it was in the 1920s, when fewer than 10% of Vermont roads were paved. Many farmers simply stayed home and worked making sugar." Cam also includes a link to a 2022 town-by-town list of paved-vs-dirt mileage from VTrans, where you'll find, for instance, that Bradford has 45 miles of paved road to 30 of dirt, while Strafford has 15 paved miles and 66 miles of gravel, graded earth, primitive, and "untravelled" roads.Today's Wordbreak. With a five-letter word from Friday's Daybreak.
Heads Up"Don’t Judge a Library By Its Building: Library Architecture & Design". Fittingly enough, the Lyme, Cornish, and Plainfield libraries once again host cultural historian Jane Oneail for an online talk—the last of three monthly presentations. "Careful thinking and planning has informed the interior and exterior design of libraries as they evolved from medieval stacks to modern community centers. This program will explore the good, the bad and the amazingly innovative in library architecture," runs the description. 6 pm.
Let's waltz into the week!How could we not? Here's DC-based folk guitarist Owen Morrison with "Daybreak", off his album of waltz originals.See you tomorrow.
Written and published by Rob Gurwitt Associate writer: Jonea Gurwitt Poetry editor: Michael Lipson About Rob About Michael
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