Daybreak Thursday 6/10/21

GOOD MORNING, UPPER VALLEY!

Cooler... A cold front dropped south yesterday and last night, and the air in its wake is pretty darn nice—drier and definitely less oppressive than it's been. Highs today in the high 70s, mostly sunny all day, winds from the north. Down into the upper 50s tonight.Protective parents...

Hanover pausing mask mandate after Dartmouth graduation. It's just a suspension, Town Manager Julia Griffin tells the Valley News's John Gregg, "in case we need to re-implement it in the event we see another large outbreak. Fingers crossed we are beyond that.” Starting Monday, masks will no longer be required outdoors. Indoors, the town is encouraging businesses to follow CDC recommendations on masking when not everyone is vaccinated, but won't be enforcing them. Town employees and visitors to town hall will still need to wear masks, Griffin says.Isabell's remains in Thetford hands. The E. Thetford institution, which Bev and Don Hodgdon ran for 17 years, has been bought by Janet and Tom Call, who live in town. They're renaming it the Red Clover Café and Creamery and, as the name suggests, adding an ice cream window—maybe as soon as August, though the café part, Nick Clark reports in Sidenote, will take longer. They'll have a similar breakfast and lunch menu, though with more plant-based foods, and one key feature will remain the same: "The need to meet and be together is just as important as what’s on the menu," says Janet.And speaking of E. Thetford... "We were all terrified about this pandemic, but I knew we had to keep working out." That's E. Thetford's Erin Donahue, who's just become one of Seven Days' "pandemic all-stars." When the pandemic shut down the Aquatic Center and other gyms, Donahue organized a thrice-weekly exercise class out in the UVAC parking lot—even though she'd never led one before. "We would go down in all weather, unless it was below about 20 degrees," says fellow Thetfordite Robin Osborne. "Especially in the beginning of the pandemic, it just felt good to have somewhere to go."And speaking of "pandemic all-stars"... Seven Days also highlights the Norwich Farm Creamery in its segment on farmstands that "provided easy access to fresh, local foods." It all started with spinach, they write: Laura Brown would drive to the Sharon Park & Ride to pick up 50 pounds from Luna Bleu's Suzanne Long. "When I came home, there'd be this line of people waiting," she says. She and her husband, Chris Gray, expanded their store's line well beyond dairy, shifting "from a little place to pick up milk to a place to get food from over 60 local producers," as one reader put it.SPONSORED: Jenni & the Junketeers celebrate the DIVAS OF JAZZ & BLUES! In an outdoor concert on Saturday, June 12th at 5:30 pm at the all-new pavilion at Artistree Community Arts Center in S. Pomfret, Vermont. Join us for a special performance celebrating some of the most beloved divas of jazz and blues, including Ella Fitzgerald, Bessie Smith, Bonnie Raitt, and others. Find a spot on our hillside and settle back as we kick off our outdoor summer music concerts at our new hillside music pavilion! Sponsored by ArtisTree.Department of no comment. VT State Police have arrested 23-year-old Jordan Deford, of Canaan NH, for suspected DUI after his car crashed on I-91 near the Wilder exit—right next to Windsor Police Chief Jen Frank. Let's go to the press release for an explanation: "Chief Frank indicated she had witnessed the crash as Deford pulled adjacent to her cruiser and lost control when he took a hand off the steering wheel and made a gesture with his middle finger. Chief Frank said Deford's vehicle crashed into the median when he lost control."Even when you've spent a lifetime out exploring the wild, a bear commands attention. The other day, naturalist Ted Levin's dogs set to frenetic barking. Expecting UPS or maybe a visitor, he looked out and saw... nothing. Then, he writes, "twenty feet above the front yard, a juvenile black bear materializes, tenuously and tentatively, in a red oak, clinging to the trunk like the Wichita linesman." He watched until the bear shimmied down the tree and disappeared. "I stood, riveted, and whistled a tune out of the 1950s. And remembered my coonskin cap and Davy Crocket lunchbox.Montshire to take part in national study of museums' social impact. The study, interestingly, is led by the Utah Division of Arts & Museums, which chose 38 museums to help it look into how they affect the communities around them and the well-being of the people who live there. They'll be surveying visitors and others on everything from the museum's impact on mental and emotional health to how it promotes learning and curiosity, expands awareness of cultures and the world around us, and builds social and family relationships.“My farming experience is pretty much the same as a white farmer’s. I do all the same work, I fix all the same broken tractors and injured cows, I deal with the same weather, I watch cows give birth, I watch cows die." Earl Ransom grew up on Rockbottom Farm in Strafford and returned to it after college; he and his wife, Amy Huyffer, run Strafford Organic Creamery there. In Brattleboro's weekly newspaper, The Commons, Virginia Ray profiles Ransom, one of a relative handful of Black farmers in Vermont. It all started as a commune his father founded in 1963...It's only early June, and already NH lakes are seeing toxic algae blooms. Normally, reports NHPR's Annie Ropeik, there are only a few reports this time of year. But the first week of June saw over a dozen reports of cyanobacteria blooms, and three state advisories are still in place: for Hopkinton's Elm Brook, Bow Lake in Strafford, and Swains Lake in Barrington (you can check state reports here). The long weekend's rain, followed by last week's hot weather was a "perfect recipe for cyanobacteria blooms," NH's beach advisory coordinator tells Ropeik.On the other hand, here's a cool thing in the water. Ectopleura crocea, a tiny, tentacled, jellyfish-like creature, is all over docks and other objects in the ocean off NH—including oystering nets and equipment. Sydney Birch, a doctoral student at UNH, has been looking into ways of warding them off... and, writes David Brooks on his Granite Geek blog, discovered that the creatures respond differently to different mixes of light and chemicals—even though all they have are neurons, not a brain. That has Birch and her advisor wondering if individual cells are integrating different types of sensory input.It's crunch time for the NH budget. Tomorrow, a conference committee of House Republicans and mostly GOP senators (there'll be one Democrat) meets to iron out differences between the versions of the state budget passed by each chamber. Next week, a similar committee meets to talk over the accompanying policy bill, which includes the 24-week abortion ban and the "divisive concepts" measure. They only have until June 17 to reach agreement, NH Bulletin's Ethan DeWitt writes in a look at what lies ahead. Gov. Chris Sununu has praised the budget part; "We have to see," he's said about the policy.NH turns to out-of-state hospitals for help with kids needing mental health care. It's cleared its emergency-room backlog of adults, but some 30 children are waiting for beds at the only in-patient mental health facility for them in the state, reports NH Bulletin's Annmarie Timmins. So the state is in talks with three hospitals in neighboring states. “If you refuse to improve your community health system and crisis intervention, I guess it is (a step in the right direction),” one Democrat tells Timmins. “But it does seem like a more efficient use of the dollars and maybe with better outcomes to provide care in the community.""What's the lesser of two evils? And the lesser of two evils was doing what we did, in order for us to be able to stop the spread of the virus.” That's VT's interim corrections commissioner, Jim Baker, explaining to VPR's Liam Elder-Connors why the DOC opted for strict lockdowns during the pandemic—even at the expense of prisoners' mental health. VT is the only state with no Covid fatalities among its incarcerated population, but long confinement took its toll. “I would not wish this on anybody," says Todd Gorton, who was confined to an 8-by-12-foot cell except for 15 minutes a day."The freedom of a long walk." Emma Gatewood was 67 when she laced up her sneakers, slung a duffel bag over her shoulder, and, in May 1955, set out from Georgia to thru-hike the Appalachian Trail—eventually becoming the first woman to do so. “I thought it would be a nice lark. It wasn’t," she told reporters at the end. Atlas Obscura's Philip D'Anieri profiles Gatewood, who raised 11 kids and survived an abusive marriage. On the trail, wrote a Sports Illustrated reporter, she heated stones and slept on them to keep from freezing, flipped aside an attacking rattler with her walking stick, and "nibbled wild huckleberries, used sorrel for salad and sucked bouillon cubes to combat loss of body salt."

And in the numbers...

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It takes a certain musical sensibility to build a repertoire that ranges from Pink Floyd to Brazilian folk songs to Henry Purcell's finest. But that's what Rosemary Standley, the French-American lead singer for the French-American band Moriarty, and Brazilian-born singer and cellist Dom La Nena did after they formed their France-based duo, Birds on a Wire. Here they are with "La Marelle," originally "Amaralinha" by the Brazilian singer Nazaré Pereira.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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