Daybreak Tuesday 10/28/25

Getting sunny eventually. We start the day with dense, patchy fog in the usual spots, but once the sun does appear, we’re looking at a nicely sunny day with highs a bit warmer than yesterday, in the lower 50s. Clear skies tonight, into the upper 20s.

Mask vs. treats? Not even a contest. At the Thetford transfer station this weekend, writes Katherine Babbot, “I thought for sure our family dogs, Gus, Clemintine, and Gilligan, would freak out over Sandra’s Halloween mask, but true to Labrador breeding, all they wanted were the treats in her pocket! Each week Sandra Marsh from Quinton Container Service greets owners and their dogs—smiles and warm chats with owners and biscuits for the dogs. Sandra celebrates any and all!”

First, clear a path to the easel. On her houseboat in DB Johnson’s Lost Woods, Lydia’s flummoxed by the mess in her studio. Then Eddie and Auk show up to help. “We’ll just move the mess around…”

Believe it or not, celery “was once grown in a rainbow of colors.” That little tidbit comes from Plainfield cookbook author and Kitchen Sense writer Mitchell Davis, who this week has a pair of recipes on the Edgewater Farm CSA blog. As Edgewater’s Jenny Sprague writes, “We have a glimpse of the end of season on the horizon but we are still very much in the thick of harvest”—they’re even still bringing in tomatoes. But Mitchell’s got his eye on heartier fare: a chopped broccoli salad (“I’m not generally a fan of raw broccoli,” he writes, “but I can’t stop eating this”) and “the height of celery gastronomy”—a celery salad with raisins, pistachios, and Bayley Hazen blue cheese.

In Claremont, an unpublished news story adds to school district intrigue. Perhaps the most important voice that’s been missing in the whole budget mess is that of Mary Henry, the former business manager for the district who’s now on unpaid leave. That may end Nov. 13, writes Damien Fisher for NH Journal, when she plans to explain herself to the school board. In the meantime, though, Fisher digs into circumstances around a freelance article written for the Eagle Times newspaper (which stopped publishing earlier this year) about a former business partner’s fraud allegations against Henry and her husband; the author says it was spiked, which former Eagle Times brass deny. The Henrys say the allegations are false.

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Out today: the original cast album of The Vermont Farm Project: A Farm-to-Stage Musical. Remember the Northern Stage musical back in May? Ever since, the theater (with the help of a bunch of audience members who donated) has been working on turning Tommy Crawford’s music and Jessica Kahkoska’s words into an album. The cast (also the musicians) spent a day recording at Cedar House Sound in Sutton, NH, and now it’s out: for download at the link, physical copies in the Northern Stage lobby and at the Crossroad Farmstand in Norwich, streaming on Spotify, Apple, etc.

And speaking of the audio version of written words… On her Happy Vermont blog, Erica Houskeeper has gone up with the podcast version of last week’s Daybreak story about Kendall Gendron and her plans for the fictional Miss Shannon’s School for Girls in E. Corinth. It’s got plenty of conversation that wasn’t part of the written version, beginning with a chat among a group of friends during the pandemic. “We thought a community hub might be an asset to our local area and something that we would frequent ourselves,” Gendron says, and lo and behold, it turned out a friend knew the people who owned the old Masonic lodge that served as the school…

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In some Upper Valley towns, Halloween candy is a group effort. That’s because certain neighborhoods in Strafford, Norwich, Woodstock, Lyme, Cornish, and Grantham get pounded by “tiny wizards, witches, superheroes and Ruth Bader Ginsburgs from surrounding communities,” as Alex Hanson puts it in the Valley News. So there’s a drop box at the Strafford General Store, school collection points in and around Woodstock, a donation box at Lyme’s Converse Free Library, a full-on spreadsheet maintained by the Norwich PTO’s Molly Gentine… And even then, homeowners fork out. “It’s amazing how not a lot of candy $1,500 is when you look at it,” says Woodstock’s Seton McIlroy.

And while we’re on the subject, a little tour… Households all over the Upper Valley pull out the decorative stops as Halloween approaches. Here’s a tiny taste:

Scat tales. Put this in the “who knew?” category. On her Naturally Curious blog, Mary Holland writes, “When coming upon scat (in New England) that has been left on an obvious, raised surface such as a stump, rock or log, two families are among the first to consider: canid (coyote, fox) and mustelid (weasels, mink, fisher, otter, martens).  Members of these families often tend to choose high spots along their travel routes…thereby leaving a scent-mark that will be seen and easily smelled by passersby.”

One more reminder not to go into the mountains unprepared—ever, but especially right now. On Saturday, it was those 20 people caught by snow and cold temps at the Mt. Washington summit who, luckily, were able to catch a ride down on the Cog. On Sunday night, NH Fish & Game reports, they sent a rescue team out after a 20-year-old Rhode Island man who was on the upper reaches of the Tuckerman Ravine Trail with a dying headlamp and cellphone and no backup equipment in windblown snow with wind chills of 3ºF. A state park staffer stationed his chained-up truck at the top of the trail, and the hiker eventually saw the lights.

How to go 24 minutes and 37 seconds without taking a breath: training and love. Budimir Šobat is a 60-year-old freediver from Croatia with “an almost maniacal pursuit of fitness,” writes Sean Williams in Outside. The former bodybuilder and basketball player had many addictions, but when his daughter was born with brain damage, she became his focus. And when he started freediving, that focus helped him quiet his mind for minutes on end—like, he fell asleep under water. Šobat, who’s training to set another record, says, “You go to the water, you hold your breath, you finish, and you go home … If you find something good in it, good. If not, also good.”

Just because you can, doesn’t mean… Or, I dunno, maybe you would mountain bike helter skelter down an abandoned mine shaft.

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

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HEADS UP
At the Norwich Bookstore, Peter Orner, Flynn Berry, and The Gossip Columnist's Daughter. Orner’s new novel starts with a real-life mystery: the still-unsolved 1963 murder in LA of Karen Kupcinet, the 22-year-old daughter of Sun-Times gossip columnist “Kup” Kupcinet and his wife, Essee—and builds on it as a struggling Chicago writer delves into the case, with his own grandparents figuring in it. Orner will talk it all over with thriller writer Flynn Berry. 7 pm.

The Fretless and Väsen at the Chandler in Randolph. Two bands—one a Juno Award–winning Toronto quartet (three fiddles and a cello) and the other a Swedish duo who play strings from from the nyckelharpa to the electric viola—blending ace musicianship, tradition, and musical exploration. 7 pm.

And the Tuesday poem.

The girls turning double-dutch
bob & weave like boxers pulling
punches, shadowing each other,
sparring across the slack cord
casting parabolas in the air. They
whip quick as an infant’s pulse
and the jumper, before she
enters the winking, nods in time
as if she has a notion to share,
waiting her chance to speak. But she’s
anticipating the upbeat
like a bandleader counting off
the tune they are about to swing into.
The jumper stair-steps into mid-air
as if she’s jumping rope in low-gravity,
training for a lunar mission… How
the whole stunning contraption of girl and rope
slaps and scoops like a paddle boat.
Her misted skin arranges the light
with each adjustment and flex. Now heather-
hued, now sheen, light listing on the fulcrum
of a wrist and the bare jutted joints of elbow
and knee, and the faceted surfaces of muscle,
surfaces fracturing and reforming
like a sun-tickled sleeve of running water.
She makes jewelry of herself and garlands
the ground with shadows.

— From “Double Dutch” by Gregory Pardlo, winner of the 2015 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry. Here’s Pardlo reading the full poem.

See you tomorrow.

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