GOOD MORNING, UPPER VALLEY!
Just like yesterday. Only cold. With high pressure in place it looks like it'll be as cloudless as it was yesterday, but temps won't get out of the 40s as a cold air mass overhead shifts eastward. Winds from the northwest today, and once again we'll see strong gusts during the day. Down to the low 20s tonight.A meditation on stick season. "After the fancy clothes are shed, naked beauty remains," writes Jay Davis of this early-morning view from Etna.Oh, and yes, it's Election Day. If you haven't cast your ballot yet, here's a list of polling places by town on both sides of the river, compiled by the Valley News. Opening times vary, all polls close at 7 pm. Go do this.Oak Hill/Storrs Pond to get snowmaking, xc ski upgrade. The $5 million project is a collaboration between Dartmouth and the Hanover Improvement Society, which each own land that hosts the extended trail network, and a new nonprofit called the Friends of Oak Hill, reports Rick Bender on DartmouthSports. The first phase will focus on improving several of the network's key cross country ski trails and installing snowmaking, Bender writes. Then will come work on lighting, upgraded facilities, and improved parking. Trail work is expected to start early next year, with snowmaking due next winter.DH launches new center on rural health equity. “Rural health inequity is one of the most significant, yet largely overlooked, challenges facing our healthcare system today,” CEO Joanne Conroy told a kickoff symposium at the Lake Morey Resort yesterday. The new Center for Advancing Rural Health Equity hopes to understand why some northern New England communities fare better on overall health outcomes than others, and then how to "tackle these stubborn disparities head-on and ensure that our patients are fully connected to the care they deserve," Conroy said. Nora Doyle-Burr's VN writeup at the link.SPONSORED: “We really are here, and that is just outrageous.” So begins BE: An Alphabet of Astonishment, a slender but expansive book by Daybreak poetry editor Michael Lipson, PhD, in which he celebrates the miracle of being itself. BE is an alphabet book: Each letter stands for some aspect of a wonder-oriented spiritual program. B for Be; C for Concentration; E for Eyes; H for Hallelujah…. Read it and marvel at the sheer fact that the Earth is. On Bookshop.com at the burgundy link, Amazon here. Sponsored by Daybreak."I’m not going to start a war against him. I have to see him every other weekend.” That's gravel racer Amity Stockwell, who had a brief, unhappy affair with fellow-racer Colin Strickland—the man whom murdered Dartmouth-grad cyclist Mo Wilson saw the night she was shot and with whom accused killer Kaitlin Armstrong had a long romantic relationship. In the New Yorker, Ian Parker tells a classically complex New Yorker story about Strickland, gravel racing's rise, the scene that's built up around it, the tangled relations of its high-profile personalities, and events in Austin before and after Wilson's death.Mom: After moving to Springfield VT, “I had to become a special-education attorney overnight." In Seven Days, Alison Novak tells the story of a single mom named Lauren and her 10-year-old son Maurice, who has cerebral palsy and other disabilities; they moved to Springfield to be closer to his DHMC team. Though the law says he's entitled to a "free and appropriate public education," the short-staffed Springfield district has kept him home for the past year and a half—even though the state has twice sided with Lauren and veteran special-ed advocate Fran De Gasta calls the case "egregious."Leb’s solid waste manager departs after groundbreaking 12 years. When Marc Morgan started the job in 2010, writes the VN’s Frances Mize, “the city’s landfill and recycling center was just another cog in the state’s waste management sector.” But as he moves to a new role in Westchester, NY, Morgan leaves an impressive legacy of waste reduction. That includes conserving space in Leb’s landfill by accepting less trash from other states and a program that will soon convert methane gas into power. Says Morgan, “I’m not going to just simply do my job. I’m trying to push it and do a little bit more.” Hartford group wants to get almost 1,000 WWI & WWII vets' names out of basement storage. They're on nameplates, which used to be on monuments put up by the town—and which, for reasons that have been forgotten, were dismantled. The volunteers, led by Mary Kay Brown, is hoping to raise funds for a new monument that would combine them, reports the VN's Liz Sauchelli—perhaps in Veterans Park, next to the courthouse on Railroad Row in WRJ. "This is our town’s history," says Brown. "If you look at these names, it’s the people that built this town."Record midterm vote expected for NH. Secretary of State Dave Scanlan on Friday predicted 591,000 ballots will be cast in today's election, a good bit over 2018's midterm record of 580,214, reports Amanda Gokee in NH Bulletin. Registered Democrats have a slight advantage over registered Republicans, but each falls short of the number of undeclared voters. Scanlan says he believes closely fought contests for US Senate and US House will fuel turnout.And ever wonder just how your mail-in ballot is handled if you live in VT? As many as half the votes cast in this year's elections will have been mailed in. So Vermont Public's Mitch Wertlieb and Bob Kinzel talk over the details: how town clerks protect a mail-in voter's privacy (state law requires one person to open the outer mailing envelope, a second to open the certified envelope inside, and a third to handle the ballot itself). They discuss other mail-in minutiae, too, such as what happens if someone forgot to sign the certification.Save room for a cornucopia of cookbooks dating back to the 1600s. From historic film footage to tons of live music recordings and everything besides, the Internet Archive is enough of a metaverse most of us will ever need. For example: more than 10K cookbooks, going back centuries. Discover odd gems like Nelson’s Pop Corn Recipes from 1916, which suggests soaking your popped corn in water overnight before you “cook them in milk…and serve with sugar and cream.” Or, from 1883, Essays on Diet, which deigns to consider the ethics of vegetarianism versus the consumption of “flesh-food.”The Tuesday Vordle. With a fine word from yesterday's Daybreak.
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Today at 5 pm, the president of Iceland, Dr. Guðni Th. Jóhannesson, will give a talk hosted by the Institute of Arctic Studies at Dartmouth's Dickey Center, "Small Iceland: Reflections on independence and interdependence, nationalism, and globalization." As they describe it, "As the Arctic has increasingly become the center of political, economic, environmental, and strategic discourse, the nations and peoples have had to contend with rapidly changing times. The President offers his reflections on this subject, and how Iceland continues to maneuver through the challenging political waters of a transforming world." In the Loew Auditorium or via Zoom.
And at 7:30 this evening, the Hop hosts the Apple Hill String Quartet and pianist Sally Pinkas in Spaulding. Based at the Apple Hill Center for Chamber Music in the Monadnock Region, the quartet specializes in "pieces amplifying new voices, views, and backgrounds in classical music; compositions from places representing the Quartet’s global travels...; and music from the historic canon and new commissions." Tonight they'll be performing piano quintets by the French 19th-century composer César Franck and South African Bongani Ndodana-Breen, and the String Quartet Ragamala by Reena Esmail.
And the Tuesday poem...
If the angle of an eye is all, the slant of hope, the slant of dreaming, according to each life,what is the light of this city,light of Lady Liberty, possessor of the most famous armpit in the world,light of the lovers on Chinese soap operas, throwing BBQ’d ducks at each other with that live-it-up-while-you’re-young, Woo Me kind of love,light of the old men sitting on crates outside geegaw shops selling dried seahorses & plastic Temples of Heaven...all of us making and unmaking ourselves, hurrying forwards, toward who we’ll become, one way only, one life only: free in time but not from it,here in the city the living make together, and make and unmake over and overQuick, quick, ask heaven of it, of every mortal relation,feeling that is fleeing,for what would the heart be without a heaven to set it on?I can’t help thinking no word will ever be as full of life as this world, I can’t help thinking of thanks.
— From
by
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 Writer/editor: Tom Haushalter Poetry editor: Michael Lipson About Rob About Tom About Michael
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