GOOD MORNING, UPPER VALLEY!
Mostly sunny, getting warmer. We started the day below freezing, but with temps warming into the low 60s we've got a thoroughly pleasant day on tap—until a system moving in from the west brings showers to the region: slight chance of rain late this afternoon, more likely overnight. Lows in the mid 40s.In Bradford, VT, The Space on Main to close. The community gathering, coworking, and events space launched in 2018 in the old Hill's 5 & 10 spot, and since then has hosted hundreds of workshops, dinners, meetings, and more. But despite fundraising efforts, founder and state Rep. Monique Priestley told followers in an announcement Friday, "We’ve not been able to bring in enough consistent funding to keep the doors open." It will be out of the space June 1, she says in in email. However, she adds: The town's teen center, The Hub, will take over—and, in conjunction with building owners Angela and Vin Wendell, wants to keep coworking, the podcast studio, and more. (Thanks, ES!)Thanks to a 30-foot, 45,000-pound piece of equipment, you get a smooth ride. As Li Shen wrote yesterday in Sidenote, it's road-grading season, and with 49 miles of dirt roads, grader operator Neil Rich has lots to keep him busy. Li offers up a tour of a grader—"an array of control buttons and joysticks around the steering wheel allow the grader operator to rotate and tilt the 12 ft long 'plow' of the grader, technically the moldboard"—and what it does: shape the road to drain water effectively. "The best water-shedding profile is a crowned center with two flat surfaces sloping gently away on either side...""No one is going to pay $150 to $200 for a snow globe.” At the moment, people all over the world happily pay about $60 for one of the globes designed and sold by Windsor's CoolSnowGlobes. But they're made in China, and with the high tariffs on goods from that country, co-owner Liz Ross tells Patrick Adrian in the Valley News, “We will have nothing left to sell after we sell what is in our warehouse because of the tariffs." Ross and her husband have worked with two factories in that country for a quarter century. "It is kind of shocking to think that the government is killing my business after 25 years," she says.SPONSORED: Left Bank Books hosts Bloodroot Literary Mag launch April 26th at 5:30PM. Our new issue of Bloodroot Literary Magazine will launch that day, and we'd like to celebrate with you at Left Bank Books in Hanover! We will begin with readings from two contributors, April Ossmann and Carlene Kucharczyk, both with new books of poetry out this spring. Then we'll have an open mic. Free and open to the public. Left Bank Books is located at 9 South Main Street in Hanover, on the second floor, just over the Dirt Cowboy Cafe. Sponsored by Left Bank Books.With "a lot of blood, sweat and tears," Baptist church reopens in Lebanon. It's been a bit over eight years since an arsonist set fire to First Baptist Church, just down the street from Colburn Park. Since then, writes Alex Hanson in the VN, the congregation has been through a rebuilding odyssey, hiring and then shedding architects and general contractors and then finally, under the guidance of two church members, finding contractors and doing a lot of work themselves. A week before Good Friday, the church reopened. "“We’re finally out of the wilderness and we’re home," says a member.SPONSORED: Celebrate our earth with optimism and action! Join friends and local experts at the Hanover Earth Week Fair, Saturday 4/26, 3 to 5 pm, Richmond Middle School (63 Lyme Road). Learn ways you can protect our planet home with activities and earth-friendly ideas. Free and open to all. Enjoy our big Earth Week cake! And multiple chances to win door prizes donated by local businesses. Learn more at the burgundy link or here. Sponsored by Sustainable Hanover and Dartmouth Sustainability.The rise of rural "maternity deserts": NH has lost nearly half its labor and delivery units over the past couple of decades. The result, writes Amanda Gokee in the Globe (paywall), is that in the North Country women in labor drive up to two hours to get to a hospital with a labor and delivery unit. “If you’re in labor, that’s a huge distance,” says DH nurse-midwife Daisy Goodman. “In the winter, it’s an almost insurmountable distance." One group, the North Country Maternity Network, is hiring doulas and training nurses, but “there’s a ton of fear” among pregnant moms, says DH doc Sanam Roder-DeWan."It has become unsustainably expensive to live in this area." You hear that regularly from Upper Valleyites, but this time it's the Windsor County sheriff, Ryan Palmer. Talking to radio producer Erica Heilman for her VT Public series on class in VT, Palmer says everything is adding up: "the average Vermonter is paying almost a mortgage payment in just property taxes," car payments are high, health insurance rates spike every year. Asked about whether legislators get that, he argues that with such low pay for the job, "we may have a citizen legislature, but a regular citizen can't be in our Legislature."
"I was pretending to buy the PEZ for the kids, but I was really buying the PEZ probably for myself." Hey, photographer Daria Bishop's just being honest about her collection of PEZ dispensers, which she began 20 years ago ostensibly as holiday gifts for her kids, but which just kept going. She's got about 600 now. For her latest "Stuck in Vermont" video for Seven Days, Eva Sollberger tours the collection with Bishop. "They're so fun and whimsical and colorful and they just bring me joy," says Bishop.The Monday jigsaw. It's a view looking south at the Ledyard Bridge, probably in the late 1800s, writes the Norwich Historical Society's Cam Cross. There's Mt. Ascutney in the far distance, and the old hamlet of Lewiston at the foot of the bridge. Cam writes it may have been taken from somewhere near where Upper Pasture, Willey Hill, and Maple Hill roads converge, back in the days when that hill was pastureland. You can find more on the bridge's history here.The Monday Wordbreak. With a word from Friday's Daybreak.
Heads Up
The path-breaking and endlessly creative baroque and early-music ensemble is in town for their Hop-sponsored concert tomorrow (
), and this evening at Our Savior Lutheran Church in Hanover, along with veteran local dance caller David Millstone, they're offering a chance "to move, listen or simply watch" a style of dance popularized in the 15th century and still evolving. 7 pm, no charge.
Well, yeah...
Because if you've never heard Ruckus, you should. A critic in San Francisco once described them as “the world’s only period-instrument rock band." They describe themselves as aiming to fuse "the early-music movement’s questing, creative spirit with the grit, groove and jangle of American roots music."
, thought to have been born aboard a slave ship in the late 1720s, brought to Britain as a two-year-old, and eventually becoming a shopowner, composer, and abolitionist.
See you tomorrow.
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