Daybreak Thursday, 6/4/26

Sunny, warm. Into the mid 80s today, but humidity’s low, so it shouldn’t feel oppressive. Breezes from the west this afternoon. Lows in the low or mid 50s.

Almost like a mirror. Yesterday, it was the river. Today, Grant Brook Estuary in Lyme, from Jay Davis.

Watch where you put those combustible materials! Firefighters from Tunbridged and Chelsea yesterday morning were called to the Tunbridge Central School, where they quickly found and put out a fire in an art classroom. One person with minor injuries was treated at the scene. The state’s Fire and Explosion Investigation Unit was called in and, according to the VT State Police, found the fire had been “caused by combustible materials being placed too close to a pottery kiln that was in use.”

“The horses are her people, and this is her place.” That’s Marjorie Aubin talking about her daughter, Hannah, and about High Horses, the equine therapy program in Sharon. As Erica Houskeeper writes for Daybreak, Hannah has gone from client to volunteer to potential staff member—a living example of what horses can do. “Because a horse’s gait mirrors how people walk, riding can support balance, strength, and coordination,” Erica writes. “It also stimulates neurological pathways, offering benefits to people with cerebral palsy, anxiety, and autism.” She explores the nonprofit’s—and horses’—work with everyone from nurses to Hannah and her brother, Wyatt.

Norwich spearheads ash tree removal; nearly 400 slated to come down. It seems like a lot, but Doug Hardy, a member of Norwich’s Emerald Ash Borer Management Group, tells the Valley News’s Clare Shanahan that the 394 trees along town roads make up just a fraction of the town’s 10,000 ash trees. The cutting work, which began Monday, is aimed at removing the most dangerous of the trees infected by the emerald ash borer. EAB, Shanahan reports, “has been confirmed in every [Vermont] community in the Upper Valley except Royalton”—and even there, it’s probably just not visible yet. Includes a photo and advice for homeowners on identification and treatment.

Primaries set for VT legislative, sheriff’s contests. The filing deadline for Democratic and Republican candidates was a week ago, and the Journal Opinion’s Alex Nuti-de Biasi rounds up what’s taking shape, with Democrats Rose Lucenti of Randolph and Monique Priestley of Bradford facing off for an Orange County senate seat; and Sharon’s Dee Gish, Norwich’s Lauren Rhim, and Thetford’s Jim Masland vying for two Windsor-Orange state rep seats. There are also contested races among Democrats for both Windsor and Orange County sheriff. Four Democrats (Ben Brickner, Elizabeth Burrows, Heather Chase, and Christopher Dube) are in the contest to succeed retiring Windsor County Sen. Allison Clarkson. All primary filers here.

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Stewart’s Shops will take down two buildings to expand West Leb convenience store. The NY chain acquired the property at the corner of Main and Bridge streets last year, when it bought the 45 gas station stores owned by Jolley Associates. It made some waves when it refused to renew the lease there held by Oriental Wok Express, which has closed. Now, reports Marion Umpleby in the VN, Stewart’s is planning a new 4,500-square-foot structure, about half again as large as the current building, to hold a new food and ice cream counter. To do this, it will tear down the existing gas station, as well as a house on a property just behind the gas station.

For gray fox kits, a “seemingly endless, nonadversarial wrestling of tumbling, butting, checking, grabbing, yanking, chewing, dragging, and pouncing.” Gray foxes in North America, naturalist Ted Levin writes on his Substack, have “moved with the forests themselves, advancing and retreating with the long breathing of climate and trees.” But young foxes neither know nor care about this: They care about play. It teaches them “how to measure and respond to the world,” Ted writes. “Deprived of play, young foxes fail to read the signals of others and often fail to mate. Play-fighting is not the sharpening of combat skills, but the shaping of a life among other gray foxes.”

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A raft of bills in NH face their ultimate legislative test today. Altogether, writes NH Bulletin’s Ethan DeWitt, 49 bills made it through the conference committees that worked out differences between House and Senate versions, and will be voted on today. He rounds up the bills to watch, including: higher state park fees for out-of-staters; changes to the business enterprise tax; a bid to make NH friendly to “blockchain-related” businesses; changes to what cities and towns can do about housing in commercial zones; a bill to require school boards to list the salaries of their top-10 paid administrators, and others related to school finances; and plenty more at the link.

How NH’s gambling boom is reshaping the casino “landscape.” In a story for Boston.com, Beth Treffeisen reports that “what was once a patchwork of mom-and-pop charity halls has slowly transformed into a booming industry of corporate-backed gaming venues” in the state. Over the past couple of decades, she writes, legislators have raised betting limits, expanded the number of table games allowed, and allowed for-profit companies to run gaming businesses on behalf of non-profits—which get 35 percent of table-game revenues (another 10 percent goes to the state). She explores the impact on the state, host towns, and gamblers as gambling keeps growing.

Tackling Vermont’s “fragmented and ineffective” animal welfare system. Nine months after Lisa Milot became the state’s first director of animal welfare, she laid out the flaws in the current system in a report to lawmakers: it’s confusing and disjointed, complaints get handed off from agency to agency with no resolution, and there are few places to put seized animals, so they’re often left in bad situations. And, writes Kevin McCallum in Seven Days, there’s little funding to improve things. So Milot is focusing on prevention—educating animal owners, setting clear animal care standards, and expanding access to affordable veterinarian care—and finding creative ways to fund it.

Swim every pond. Sally Cummings and Jenness Ide (75 and 81, respectively) haven’t finished their quest to swim every lake and pond in Vermont, but they’re closing in on their goal: They’ve hit “more than 100 water bodies” over the years, and have 63 to go, writes Lorry Martinez for UVM’s Community News Service. The rules, she notes, are simple: 10 strokes out and back. “If there is a floating dock, they must swim to it.” But they also take photos and take notes: the nudist colony they encountered on one pond, the banana bread a dock-owner gave them, the directions to hard-to-find ponds provided by friendly strangers. “The fun is in the journey,” says Cummings.

You think you have a lot of photos? At 154 million objects, the Smithsonian’s collection is almost unfathomable. The world’s largest museum complex—21 museums and venues—can’t exhibit everything, so they’ve joined forces with Unsplash, an online resource for free high-res photos, to share 1,000 images from the Smithsonian collection. You can wander through them, download, use any way you want: Portraits (Alexander Graham Bell, Sojourner Truth), typewriters and textiles, spitfire airplanes and dinosaur skeletons … scroll for surprises, or choose from the 12 collections (including Asian Art and Air and Space) and dive in. Click on an image for description.

The Thursday Crossword. It’s puzzle artist Laura Braunstein’s “midi”—a mildly longer brain workout than the Tuesday “mini.”

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

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HEADS UP
Art teacher and lecturer Pippa Drew on Edward Hopper at the Bugbee Center in WRJ. “Though he painted during the impassioned era of Abstract Expressionism, Hopper found his power in the quiet. His iconic cityscapes and portraits go beneath the surface, capturing the cinematic shadows and haunting isolation of 20th-century life. Watercolors from Hoppers summers in Vermont will also be included.” 1 pm.

Pride of Woodstock kicks off with a gravel ride and film. The film, Claim The Lane: Becoming Roxy, is Jesse Huffman’s 2025 film about Roxy Bombardier, who deployed with the National Guard to Iraq from 2005 to 2006, transitioned to a woman at the age of 51, and became a dedicated gravel rider. The ride—with Bombardier and Huffman—sets off from Ranch Camp in Woodstock at 3 pm. Film at 7 in the Town Hall Theatre.

VINS kicks off Treetop Golden Hour. It’s the first of three Thursday evenings this month. As they write, “When the shadows grow long and the evening light has a golden glow, that is a special time to be in the forest. Take a stroll on the Forest Canopy Walk during the golden hour, spend time with friends and family, and enjoy a cold beer from Lawson’s Finest Liquids. If you’re lucky you may even catch a glimpse of the wild bald eagles.” 5:15 to 7 pm.

The Vermont Farm Project re-forms at Feast and Field. The music series at Fable Farm in Barnard brings in Tommy Crawford and members of the original cast and creative team of the Northern Stage hit show to play songs from the show “alongside new original songs, classic American folk songs, bluegrass jams, and more.” Doors and food at 5:30, music starts up around 6.

Mascoma Bank’s Pete Begin at the Beaver Meadow Schoolhouse in Norwich with “Staying Safe in a Digital World: Understanding Fraud Tactics.” Begin, the bank’s VP in charge of security and fraud prevention, will talk about how to recognize the most common current scams—from texts to fake links to spoofed calls and high-pressure tactics—and how to safeguard your financial information. 7 pm, 246 Chapel Hill Rd.

And JAM’s got highlights! This week: Last Saturday’s panel discussion at the Center for Cartoon Studies about Tillie Walden’s Charity and Sylvia and about the work that goes into historical cartooning with Walden, Joel Christian Gill, and Marek Bennett; poets Ben Pease and Bianca Stone at the Wilder Library a few weeks ago; and last fall’s “Dark Fantasy” drag show at the Main Street Museum.

And for today...

Harrell “Young Rell” Davenport, from Vicksburg, Mississippi, started playing guitar and harmonica at 7… and that was just a dozen years ago. His debut album comes out tomorrow and they’re keeping it under wraps, but here’s “Hate the Bite,” which dropped last year.

See you tomorrow.

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