Daybreak Monday, 5/11/26

Sunny this morning, getting cloudier. We’re mostly looking at a dry couple of days (fire-weather dry, in fact), though some weak low pressure up north will bring some clouds this afternoon. Otherwise, temps today will get into the upper 50s or possibly low 60s, while that dry air and clear skies overnight will drop lows down toward freezing, with patchy frost warnings overnight.

Hiding in the grass. “I was out searching for fiddleheads in Thetford,” writes Lori Harriman, “and came across a small patch of them. After picking a handful, I was startled by a turkey flying out of the nearby brush, which exposed her clutch of eggs. I quickly walked away and then got this photo with the telephoto lens on my phone.”

VT State Police investigate death in Norwich. The call to a house on Douglas Hill Road came in mid-morning on Saturday. There, officers who responded found the body of a woman, and Norwich Police Chief Matthew Romei quickly made the decision to call in the state’s Major Crimes Unit, which spent most of Saturday, Saturday night, and yesterday going over the scene, reports Eric Francis for Daybreak. The house belongs to Hanover-based orthodontist Donald Neely and his wife and office manager Noel—who was a state rep from Pomfret from 1977-82. Eric’s story and interview with Romei, with photos of the house and the activity at Norwich’s police station, at the link.

Royalton farmers market to go weekly. Thanks to a $12,000 grant from the Jack and Dorothy Byrne Foundation, reports Liz Sauchelli in the Valley News, the SoRo-based nonprofit organization BALE has been able to hire Keri Ryan, who also runs Woodstock’s weekly Market on the Green, to oversee the Royalton market from June 7 through Sept. 27 on the South Royalton Green. The market had shut down in 2023 and 2024; last year, it came back biweekly. The new weekly market, Ryan tells Sauchelli, has had 33 vendors sign up, with probably 20 vendors at the market each Sunday. “We’re just excited to have people participating,” she says.

In Vershire, a 16-year-old takes on cemetery-keeping. It kind of goes with the position of cemetery trustee to which Liba Vitols was elected at town meeting not long ago. “I love the feeling of cemeteries, and I also love that it’s a remembrance of the people that we’ve had in our lives,” she tells Maryellen Apelquist in The Herald. “It’s one of those things that I think should be preserved.” As Apelquist notes, Vitols was pretty much born into community engagement: Her mom, Andrea Harrington, is a librarian and used to run the community’s free summer camp. Her father, Karl, was a longtime organizer behind Vershire’s annual Snowshoe-a-thon and winter carnival.

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In a first for the Hood Museum, it plans to spotlight its Asian art. Asian Art at Dartmouth: Highlights from the Hood Museum of Art will open early next year, “the first major exhibition to showcase the breadth and quality of the museum's Asian art collection,” the museum writes in its announcement. “Spanning four galleries, it will showcase art from East, South, and Southeast Asia, as well as the Himalayas, primarily focusing on works created before 1950, though selected contemporary pieces will also appear.” Of the 191 objects in the exhibition, 103 have never been on view before.

Strafford gets used to the Noah Kahan traffic. “Somebody comes in just about every day that we can tell is not from here,” comments Strafford General Store manager Adam Smith to VTDigger’s Kevin O’Connor, who reports on how the town of just shy of 1,110 residents “finds itself in the global spotlight” thanks to its famous sometime resident. “Our building is in one of his videos, so we have people stopping and taking pictures,” Town Clerk Lisa Bragg says of the 143-year-old municipal office. “I think it’s in, I’m not sure, ‘Stick Season’?” When O’Connor checked out Alger Brook Road, which is in one of Kahan’s songs, a neighbor told him, “You’re the second one in 20 minutes.”

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Clarification: On tomorrow’s Hanover zoning vote. Last week’s item on a string of zoning amendments noted that Article 7 “is a petitioned article to undo” last year’s changes to the town’s zoning code that seek to ease barriers to building housing that’s affordable to people of ordinary means. It’s not a wholesale repeal, but instead aims to reverse an option “to build three- and four-unit residences” on smaller lots, as Clare Shanahan writes in the VN. The article “would also remove single-residence districts from a special overlay district with eased zoning restrictions.” You can get a sense of the debate in the VN’s letters to the editor here (give the link a second; it’ll catch up).

“Like being enveloped in a green mist.” Over the years, former professional gardener Allen Norcross has steered his blog “New Hampshire Garden Solutions” beyond its early goal of providing gardening advice toward a more general appreciation of NH nature. His most recent post starts with an ode to this fleeting moment we’re just about done with: “The soft greens began on the forest floor with a sedge here, a fiddlehead there, and then they climbed into the understory, coloring the hobblebushes, elderberries and honeysuckles. Now they have climbed into the trees, that beautiful softness of spring.” And moves on to much more. (Thanks, JR!)

Could a super El Niño spur record heat, more intense thunderstorms, and more coastal storms for New England this summer? The latest models, reports the Globe’s Ken Mahan (paywall), are warning “of a rare ‘monster’ El Niño emerging this summer that’s more intense than forecasters had previously predicted.” “This updated El Niño forecast for this summer/autumn is off the charts extreme,” NOAA’s former chief scientist tells Mahan. It’s a global phenomenon, of course, affecting the jet stream, and if predictions hold we’re looking at hotter-than-normal weather lasting into next year, tropical nights into the fall, and a warmer, wetter (but not as snowy) winter.

The Monday Jigsaw: Back to the bicycle past. This week’s puzzle is the fruit of Cam Cross’s researches after he dug into “how the bicycle has evolved since its beginnings, and was delightfully fascinated by what I found.” Including the history of the penny-farthing and then, in 1885, John Kemp Starley’s Rover Safety Bicycle, the subject of the puzzle and a close ancestor of the modern variety. Here’s his Curioustorian substack post about it all.

Today's Wordbreak. With a word from Friday’s Daybreak.

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And for today...

Dorothy Moskowitz never steered her singing career to fame and fortune, which is probably no surprise for someone who got her start in the San Francisco experimental electronic rock scene (with United States of America in the late ‘60s). She later moved on to the somewhat better-known Country Joe's All-Star Band. But she’s persevered: Now in her mid-80s, Moskowitz has teamed up with the enigmatic Five Day Miracle Tent Crusade, a collective led by Bay Area musicians Edward W. Dahl (SpacEKrafT, Lopsided Space Kart), Allen Whitman (The Mermen, Joe Satriani), and Dave Gresalfi (Beyond-O-Matic). They’ve just put out their third album. Here’s the playfully tuneful “Too Much”.

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