Daybreak Monday 6/7/21

WELCOME TO THE WEEK, UPPER VALLEY!

Though sheesh, 90s again? At least it's warming things up nicely for you open-water swimmers... That high pressure is still in control of the eastern US, and with this morning starting out in the mid-60s and barely any clouds to speak of up there, the weather folks say there's a good chance "several record high temperatures will be threatened" today. Oh, also: more humid. Down to the high 60s tonight.First steps. Last week, Dr. Nina McCampbell was on her way to work at APD when, in the early morning haze, a doe stepped into the road....followed by a tiny, shaky-legged fawn. "Fawns are capable of standing within a half-hour of birth," naturalist Ted Levin explains. "Does usually move them away from the birthing site early the first day, often within a few hours. This might have been the fawn's maiden voyage." All on video.Movie theaters dip toes back in the water. The Nugget, reports John Lippman in the Valley News, will reopen for three shows daily on Fridays, Saturdays, and Sundays starting June 18, while Pentangle Arts hopes to open the Woodstock Town Hall Theater in August, pending staffing and work on the building's HVAC system. The Fairlee Drive-in opened Friday, Bethel is aiming for June 18, and the Claremont Cinema Center is already open Fridays-Sundays. Missing from list: the Entertainment Cinemas Leb's Miracle Mile, which are caught up in legal wrangling between the operator and the landlord.Drive on Rt. 132 in Thetford? Get ready for more construction. In Sidenote, Li Shen details the rebuilding project between Tucker Hill Road and the Norwich Line, which is slated to start tomorrow, though surveyors and crews will be around starting today. This phase of the project (the work from Tucker Hill to S. Strafford is done but for the finishing touches) will start with removing the current asphalt and gravel (which will be stored at the Union Village Dam overlook) then, over the summer and fall, new paving, ditches, and shoulders will go in. Includes a construction timeline.SPONSORED: William Smith Auctioneers in Plainfield NH, welcomes you back! Our spectacular, live post-Memorial Day auction is full of beautiful antiques, wonderful art (Grandma Moses, Paul Sample), the most amazing jewelry—including diamonds, sapphires and emeralds, Tiffany, Bulgari, and Van Cleef & Arpels—a convertible Mercedes, a Jaguar, and two BMW’s. Please come see it all this week, June 7-11th, 10-4 daily or on our website (at the maroon link). Then join us at the auction on Saturday, June 12. We look forward to seeing you! Sponsored by William Smith Auctioneers.NH liquor stores set eyes on VT customers. Though liquor sales seem to be holding their own in Vermont, John Lippman writes in the VN, the Upper Valley "has been at the center of the New Hampshire Liquor Commission’s expansion plans, relocating and building new stores in high-trafficked spots easily accessible from the Vermont side of the river." That includes the big West Leb outlet opened in 2019, now one of the empire's highest-grossing stores, and the new outlet in Claremont, due to open next month. New London's has expanded, as well.Curiously, no word on what happened to the moose. But the NH state police have a pic of the car that was absolutely totaled by colliding one early yesterday morning up in Dummer, which is north of Berlin. And they want to remind drivers "to be extremely cautious and remain alert while driving during the evening hours as crashes with NH wildlife can happen quickly.""A short window." That's how NH Health Commissioner Lori Shibinette sees this moment, when there are just three people in crisis on the waiting list for inpatient psychiatric care (as of last Thursday), down from 33 two weeks ago. The state has been there before, writes Teddy Rosenbluth in the Monitor, only to see the list grow within a few months. The challenge, she says, is to build a community-based infrastructure quickly, using the $100 million Gov. Chris Sununu announced last week, starting with 60 new "transitional" beds around the state for people leaving inpatient care."The primary feedback is ‘yay.’" That's the response to moves by high schools around Vermont (and, no doubt, across the river, too) to hold high school graduation in person this month. Outdoor events, Nora Peachin writes in VTDigger, "may now include as many as 900 unvaccinated people and any number of vaccinated people as spacing allows." The result: graduation ceremonies are returning to normal—though last year's car parades were so popular that at least one school is doing both. “The biggest challenge," says one principal, "is trying to be cautiously optimistic.”Definitely not "yay." That would be the response of teachers and other school staff to the prospect of an extended summer session, writes Lola Duffort in VTDigger. "I literally cannot do it. I will not do it. It’s too much,” one math teacher in Middlebury told her principal when he proposed extending summer school to six weeks. “Those who worked all year are exhausted,” Windsor Southeast superintdent David Baker tells Duffort. “I am not sure of the reason for this, but support staff, bus drivers and kitchen workers have been particularly difficult to find.” Oh man, is Maine's state dessert in danger? It's blueberry pie, of course, and there's a recent study from a group of scientists affiliated with the U of Maine finding that the average temperature in the blueberry fields Down East over the past 40 years rose faster than the statewide average. The seemingly small difference, writes the AP's Patrick Whittle, could lead to water deficits that might result "in smaller crop sizes and blueberries that are less likely to survive to be harvested." Last year's harvest was the smallest since 2004."Trolling, pre-internet." In 1860, Robert Todd Lincoln, Abe's son, spent a year at Phillips Exeter Academy after failing to gain admission to Harvard. On July 4, he stood on a rock in Stratham, NH, and recited the Declaration of Independence—which was commemorated with a plaque. On Reddit, a user posts a photo of the plaque and then another, smaller, more recent one, noting the moment in 1974 that Margaret Consalvi stood on the boulder and recited the names of her cat and her sister's dog.  "A physics puzzle so elaborate that it can never be mastered." The nature of dark matter? Nope. Bowling. And at the center of it, the ball. And at the center of that, writes Brendan Koerner in Wired, the core: "Unlike baseballs and golf balls, which are built around spherical cores, bowling balls contain cores that defy easy description: They can bear vague resemblance to gas masks, hand grenades, guitar bodies, Easter Island statues, Rorschach ink blots." And if you want to understand the core? Mo Pinel, whose ball designs revolutionized the sport. Famously crusty, he talks to Koerner anyway.

Okay, so...

This is a good sign, though not especially useful for our purposes today: Both NH and VT have stopped reporting case numbers on Saturdays and Sundays, so the most recent data for each is Friday's. When...

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"Calmness, peace, patience, simplicity. And then sadness, longing, wandering, searching, openness, oneness." Those are the feelings, the Pakistan-born, Berklee-trained, Brooklyn-based singer and musician Arooj Aftab says, that Sufi poetry seeks to convey and that she tries to weave into her music. Which, somehow,

, her soulful version of a famous Urdu ghazal (poetry of love and longing), off her just-released album

Vulture Prince

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See you tomorrow.

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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Written and published by Rob Gurwitt         Banner by Tom Haushalter    Poetry editor: Michael Lipson  About Rob                                                    About Tom                             About Michael

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