GOOD MORNING, UPPER VALLEY!
Rain at some point. Today we get a cold front passing through, though the temperature won't really start reflecting it until tomorrow. There's a rising chance of rain all morning and a certainty during the afternoon. Highs this afternoon either side of 50, winds from the southeast, shifting to the south. Down to the lower 30s tonight.Look up! Because there's almost always something worth seeing. Like...
Mt. Ascutney in the early-morning light, as seen from across the river in Meriden, by Michelle Feller-Kopman.
And the eye-catching sky over Hanover one morning last week, as seen from the CVS parking lot, by Cam Cross.
Box truck in Grantham crashes after swerving to avoid animal, shuts down I-89 temporarily. It happened early yesterday morning, the NH State Police report, when the northbound driver approached a left-hand curve, veered off course because of an animal in the roadway, then scraped the right-hand guardrail for 100 feet or so before coming to rest down an embankment. The driver was unhurt. No word on the animal.For second time in just over a week, inmate dies at Springfield prison. Romeo Reome III, of Brattleboro, was found unresponsive in his cell early yesterday morning after his cellmate alerted prison staff. He had been treated at Springfield Hospital for health issues early Tuesday morning, the state police said in a release. VTDigger's Alan J. Keays reports that he is the sixth inmate in corrections custody to die this year. "From 2017 through 2021," he adds, "an average of three per year died in Vermont’s prisons... Most of them—12—died at the Springfield prison," which tends to house the oldest and sickest inmates.Hartford selectboard tensions spill over into team-building meeting. They first surfaced at an organizational meeting earlier this month, after board member Lannie Collins lost a bid for vice chairman. On Tuesday, the board "attempted to unpack the hostility on display" at that earlier meeting, reports Patrick Adrian in the Valley News, focusing on how to go about team-building training “to understand their similarities instead of their differences," as Collins put it. That discussion was cut short when board member Rocket abruptly left, after criticizing his colleagues for being intolerant of differing viewpoints.SPONSORED: Rooted Gardens' advice on pruning apple and ornamental trees. Trees right now are leaving peak dormancy and are best suited for limb removal: The aseptic winter air is a safer environment for exposed wood, which will soon begin to scab over with spring growth. Clean and sharpen your equipment often. Remove the dead branches first. Step back regularly and observe the tree from different angles. Prune everything you can from the ground. And please be safe with saws and ladders! Call us at Rooted Gardens in Norwich with any questions: (802) 281-0781. Sponsored by Rooted Gardens."With nuance and clarity, [Sweat's actors] play people, not pathos." Lynn Nottage's Pulitzer-winning play, about the vaporization of the manufacturing economy at the start of the 21st century, is at Northern Stage for just a few more days, through Sunday. In Seven Days, theater critic Alex Brown writes that it's filled with a wealth of performances "that capture Nottage's ability to express big ideas through the small actions of complex characters." It's not an easy play, but, Brown says, "like all tragedies, it's also a light left on in the darkness to show us the way back out."Air filled with sulfur fumes, dead crops, miners threatening to ransack Vershire—the nearly vanished history of the area's copper mines. Vermont Public's Lexi Krupp follows yesterday's story about the cleanup of Corinth's Pike Hill mine with a look at the history of copper mining around this stretch of Orange County. She talks to amateur historian Susan Bibeau, who's researched the mining era and describes both miners' lives and what used to stand in what are now plain woods. "No question, this was a boom town that went bust," she says of one part of W. Fairlee. Krupp's also got a video tour.SPONSORED: Fairlee is looking for a town administrator. The town is seeking an experienced and accomplished leader to administer and supervise overall operations under the direction and at the discretion of the Selectboard. Preference for at least five years of work-related experience with at least two of them in a managerial capacity, or an equivalent combination of education, training, and experience. Complete job announcement and application info at the burgundy link. Deadline is May 5. Sponsored by the Town of Fairlee, VT.NH Exec Council approves deal for new psychiatric hospital, contract for new mental health beds at DHMC. Both arrangements will use money from the federal American Rescue Plan Act to boost the ability to treat people in a mental health crisis. SolutionHealth, which owns hospitals in Manchester and Nashua, will get up to $15 million toward a 120-bed psychiatric hospital somewhere in southern NH. The state will also spend $1 million helping DHMC with renovations that will add five psychiatric beds, expanding its ability to care for people admitted involuntarily, reports NHPR's Paul Cuno-Booth.NH House narrowly rejects parental bill of rights. An amendment, which would have mandated that teachers tell parents if a schoolchild has changed pronouns (or risk jail time), failed 190-194; the House then tabled the full measure. But, NH Bulletin's Ethan DeWitt reports, a Senate version that also requires reporting changes in gender pronouns to parents passed earlier this month, and will get a House floor vote at some point. The measure's backers argued schools shouldn't withhold information because a parent might react badly; its opponents countered that it could put kids' mental health at risk.Low Medicaid payments put aging in place for hundreds at risk in NH. Roughly 3,800 Granite Staters rely on the Medicaid-funded Choices for Independence program to get help with basic needs. But two providers, Ascentria Care Alliance and Waypoint, say they will leave the program unless the state raises reimbursement rates, reports Annmarie Timmins in NH Bulletin. The groups for years have relied on donations to undergird costs—and even then, pay direct care workers $13.50 an hour. "It’s going to break the organization if it continues at this rate," Ascentria's CEO tells Timmins."He's got rooms, and we need rooms." That is how a VT Legal Services attorney characterizes what he's heard privately from a state official about a motel owner who, as Chelsea Edgar describes it in Seven Days, seems to have been taking the state for a ride in its efforts to house homeless tenants. Edgar's investigation starts with a former tenant who's struggled for months to get the security deposit the owner owes her, but moves quickly on to broader problems: terrible living conditions (as VTDigger reported earlier this month), exorbitant rates (including $8K/month at a motel in Bradford), and more.“The sculptures that I make have life, they have a soul, it is the same soul that Mother Earth has.” Andoni Bastarrika is a sand sculptor, speaking here with My Modern Met’s Sara Barnes about why he sculpts animals—“nothing is straight, everything is round, everything is fluid”—and how surprised he is that people mistake his art for living beings. They are, he notes, just sand and water (stone powder adds color). But oh! What beautifully rendered sand and water. Dogs, lions, hippos, snakes, all resting on the beach against sky and water, somehow both out of place and so at home.The Thursday Vordle. With a word from yesterday's Daybreak.Daybreak doesn't get to exist without your support. Help it keep going by hitting the maroon button:
There's an interesting effort afoot in Thetford: to create a "Thetford User's Manual" for residents and visitors. What it might look like, though, is wide open, and today from 5-6 pm the Latham Library is hosting an open house for townsfolk to drop in and talk about what could be included. Of special interest for anyone who's curious—and might want to think about something like this in their town—there'll be examples of what Bethel and Middlesex VT have done.
Today at 5:30, the White River Indie Film festival kicks off four days of films, parties, workshops, panel discussions, get-togethers with regional filmmakers like Ben Silberfarb and Liam O'Connor-Genereaux, and overall, a chance to watch and talk about a raft of new, thought-provoking films, both documentary and fiction. Tonight at 5:30, things get going at JAM with a celebration of emerging filmmakers in the region, followed at 7 at the Briggs by a secret screening of "a rip roaring comedy/action/adventure" and then Talent Show, by West Leb's Noah Mauchly.
Also at 5:30, Sustainable Woodstock hosts Don and Annie Smith-Jones, who work on addressing lead and mercury poisoning in economically depressed areas of the world. They'll be talking about that work, how mercury and lead get into the water, land, and air (think gold mining, glazed pottery, batteries...) and in general how to clean up toxic pollution. Online.
This evening at 7, the Norwich Bookstore presents its long-awaited conversation (it's had to cancel a couple of times) with two editors and two local contributors to Volume III of the Vermont Almanac. Norwich writer Edith Forbes and Hartford farmer Chuck Wooster will join editors Virginia Barlow and Patrick White to read from and talk about the latest edition and its record of a year's worth of life in the forests, fields, and communities of the Green Mountain State.
And to start us off...
The Meltdown likes to call its music "southern soul"—but it's not quite the South you're thinking of. The band is part of the freewheeling and ever-expanding soul, funk, jazz, and groove scene in Melbourne, Australia that produced the Teskey Brothers—though as one leading musician there puts it, it's “not so much a scene as a bunch of share-houses filled with broke musos who like to hang out playing music with each other all day.” Whatever. The Meltdown is a prominent, essence-of-cool part of it.
See you tomorrow.
The Hiking Close to Home Archives. A list of hikes around the Upper Valley, some easy, some more difficult, compiled by the Upper Valley Trails Alliance. It grows every week.
The Enthusiasms Archives. A list of book recommendations by Daybreak's rotating crew of local booksellers, writers, and librarians who think you should read. this. book. now!
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 Poetry editor: Michael Lipson Associate Editor: Jonea Gurwitt About Rob About Michael
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