GOOD MORNING, UPPER VALLEY!
Sun to start. Then snow. We’re at the brink of a period of warmer weather, and should reach the upper 20s by early afternoon, with mostly sunny skies this morning before clouds arrive later, ahead of what the weather service calls a “widespread light to moderate snowfall” arriving west to east in the mid or late afternoon and lasting at least until midnight—and in some parts, into tomorrow. Around here, we’re looking at 2-4 inches; more in the mountains. Lows tonight around 20, maybe upper teens.
Here are the expected totals:
Bird at work. It’s astounding that woodpeckers don’t get headaches. Here’s a pileated “slowly but surely demolishing a tree” in Sheila Culbert’s yard in Meriden; you get a really good sense of just how much oomph they put into it.
Frostbite Savings Time. In DB Johnson’s Lost Woods this week, Auk and Eddie talk over New Year’s—and Henry’s campaign to observe it in March. Because someone has to celebrate skunk cabbage…
Plans for revived Thetford Center Village Store come into focus. As you remember, a community group recently announced it’s bought the building, with plans to renovate it and turn it over to a manager to run. In the Valley News, Sophia Langlois reports that the manager is now set: Crossmolina Farm’s Margaret Loftus. “We are hoping to create a homey and welcoming place where people want to spend time and feel comfortable when they walk in the door,” she tells Langlois—with breakfasts and lunches made using Crossmolina’s ingredients. As for the other part, organizer Tim Briglin says the building’s systems are all failing and it’ll take $1 million to fix up.
Royalton’s Christopher Dartt “did as he pleased, structuring his work-life around what he liked — hunting and fishing, the Tunbridge Fair, sugaring and haying.” As his lifelong friend Tim Silovich tells Alex Hanson in the VN, Dartt “was an old Vermont soul. A classic old Vermonter.” He was just 38 when he died by suicide on Jan. 1 after sliding off the road and into a tree on his way home from Babe’s. He had a prodigious memory, Hanson writes, and spent hours with maps of Vermont’s back roads—which was handy, because “he hated driving main roads.” In his profile, Hanson paints a man who was content on his own, generous with his skills and time, but also isolated. If you or someone you know is struggling, call or text 988.
SPONSORED: IMPACT NORWICH today! Everyone loves a scholarship, especially when it’s need-based. IMPACT NORWICH is the Norwich Women’s Club’s annual appeal and its funds help Norwich students with college tuition, technical schools, and post-grad programs, and support projects that enhance life for the Norwich community and beyond! We’ve been raising money for 118 years, and want this year to be the most successful. We have a $15,000 match to urge you on. Support our students and special ”Norwich community and beyond” community projects by supporting IMPACT NORWICH at the burgundy link. Sponsored by the Norwich Women’s Club.
Beneath the snow, an entire world. The subnivium, naturalist Ted Levin explains in his latest Another Morning in Paradise post, is the narrow layer between snow and ground, where snow vaporizes, forming “an igloo, where the soil stays warm enough not to freeze.” It’s busy down there! “Microbes and fungi feed on autumn’s fallen largesse, storing carbon. Species of predatory rove beetles and meshweaver spiders, dormant in summer, hunt beneath the snowpack. Springtails—snow fleas—scavenge the subnivium and crowd our footsteps on warmer winter days.” And there are ruffed grouse, wood frogs brumating, voles nesting, weasels and red squirrels hunting…
Mmmm. Fresh cambium. Well, look. If you’re a beaver hanging out in your lodge in mid-winter and all you’ve got at hand to eat, as Mary Holland puts it in Naturally Curious, is a “three-month-old submerged pile of water-soaked branches,” you’d probably brave frigid temps for some of that sub-bark tree layer if there’s enough open water to get out and back in. Which is how Holland happened upon a beaver that had ventured out in 9°F weather. The meeting, she writes, “provided me with not only an encounter with the cold-to-the-point-of-barely-moving beaver, but also showed me what the trail of a beaver walking in a foot of snow looks like.” Photos of both.
SPONSORED: Check out virtual language programs from Dartmouth’s Rassias Center! Virtual Semi-intensive Language Programs run Mondays and Wednesdays for six weeks over Zoom beginning April 13. They are an opportunity to start learning a new language, refresh and reinforce a previously studied language, or master a language. Currently offering French, Spanish, and Italian. Learn more here or at the burgundy link. Sponsored by The Rassias Center.
Investigators using new tools in Maura Murray search. Yesterday marked the 22nd anniversary of the U Mass nursing student’s disappearance from a roadside in N. Haverhill after her car went off the road. She was gone—and the car locked—when police arrived. Yesterday, Cold Case Unit chief Chris Knowles told WMUR’s Arielle Mitropoulos that they still receive tips weekly, and that investigators are now “using facial recognition and LiDAR, which can detect abnormalities in the ground.” Murray’s sister, Julie, tells Mitropoulos, “I think this case is solvable. I think they need more resources, and we've been clamoring for that.” The family held a vigil last night.
For NH “bathroom bill,” third time is not the charm. On Friday, reports NH Bulletin’s William Skipworth, Gov. Kelly Ayotte vetoed House Republicans’ third attempt to allow schools, businesses, and organizations to exclude transgender people “from restrooms, locker rooms, jails, and other spaces that don’t match their sex at birth.” They’d tried, with nearly identical language, in 2024 and 2025: Both those bills were also vetoed, first by Chris Sununu and then by Ayotte. Last year, Ayotte said the bill was “overly broad and impractical to enforce, potentially creating an exclusionary environment for some of our citizens.” This year, she raised a similar objection.
NH state commissioner steps down over detention facility row. Sarah Stewart’s last day heading the state’s Dept. of Natural and Cultural Resources was yesterday, after she drew fierce criticism from other state officials, including Ayotte, after her agency failed to alert them to documents submitted Jan. 12 by the federal Department of Homeland Security about its plan to use a warehouse in Merrimack as an ICE detention facility. As late as the end of January, Ayotte had denied any formal knowledge of the plan. “This was a serious lapse of communication,” Ayotte said after learning of the documents. Stewart had already said she’d be resigning in June.
Hikers rescued in subzero temps from near Camel’s Hump summit. Things were dire up there, say the VT State Police, when search and rescue teams reached a pair of Canadian hikers just shy of midnight on Saturday, with wind chills approaching minus 20 degrees F and in deep snow. Both hikers were hypothermic. “Crews provided immediate treatment to the pair,” the VSP says in its release; one was able to walk down the trail with assistance after being warmed; the other was carried down in a litter. Officials say “the combined efforts of multiple rescue crews in incredibly challenging conditions saved the lives of the two hikers.”
FEMA denies disaster aid to NEK towns for 2025 flooding. The July 10 storm last year “caused major damage to homes, roads, bridges and other public infrastructure” in several small towns, writes VTDigger’s Emma Cotton; estimated damages exceeded VT’s $1.2 million threshold for a disaster declaration. Town officials tell Cotton “they will struggle to pay for the repairs they’ve already made to essential infrastructure. In some cases, towns may need to raise taxes.” VT’s emergency management director says the state won’t speculate about what the rejection might mean for future disasters. “We don’t have a lot of information coming from the federal government,” he says.
Diving into Act 181. What, you don’t recognize the number? Act 181 was enacted two years ago—over Gov. Phil Scott’s veto—as a bid to over Vermont’s Act 250, which has broadly come to be seen as impeding housing development in the state. For VT Public and VTDigger, Report for America’s Carly Berlin takes a two-part look. In the first piece (at the burgundy link), with Digger’s Erin Petenko, she parses the confusing “tiers” that the state’s using to map out where and how development can occur. In part 2, she reports on the response in the legislature and elsewhere now that those maps are appearing, including concern that the most restrictive tier may be too restrictive.
An “ethereal and delicate presence” deep in the ocean, and the friends it just can’t live without. Off the coast of Argentina, 800 feet down in the Atlantic, researchers have just caught amazing footage of a giant phantom jellyfish. The monumental creatures, which stretch up to 30 feet long, have only been seen some 100 times in as many years, writes Alexa Robles-Gil in the NYT (gift link). They hang out in the midnight zone, a dark part of the ocean that goes down 13,000 feet. There, smaller creatures seek shelter and a symbiotic relationship with big creatures like these jellies, which offer protection and food in the form of jelly parasites. Amazing video.
The Tuesday crossword. It’s time for Dartmouth librarian and puzzle hotshot Laura Braunstein’s Tuesday “mini,” a short little brain stretcher for your morning. And if you’d like to catch up on past puzzles, you can do that here.
Today's Wordbreak. With a word from yesterday’s Daybreak.
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HEADS UP
Dartmouth’s Dickey Center presents “Weaponizing Commerce: The New Era of Industrial Policy and National Security”. Frank Lavin, former US Under Secretary for International Trade under President George W. Bush, was the country’s lead trade negotiator for China and India and oversaw global commercial policy, export promotion, and trade talks. He’ll be talking with the Tuck School’s Davin Chor about how policy makers are using tariffs, export controls, and industrial policy, and their implications. 5 pm in Haldeman 41, as well as online.
Online: “Made for Each Other: Famous Couples from the World of Art”. The next in the series of art-related talks hosted by the public libraries in Lyme, Canaan, and Plainfield, art historian and educator Jane Oneail will talk about how those couples “inspired, pushed and influenced each other.” Includes Dutch Baroque artists Judith Leyster and Jan Molenaer, early modernists Georgia O’Keeffe and Alfred Stieglitz, and Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera. 6:30 pm.
Poet Philip Mulligan at the Norwich Bookstore. Mulligan, a farmer and builder as well as a poet, has a new collection out, Despite Gravity, that blends “whimsy, some personal history and an appreciation of the natural world,” the bookstore writes. “In it, Mulligan explores the sense of being anchored while still knowing how to fly and carry what’s essential.” 7 pm.
Sally Pinkas and Friends at the Hop. The Hop’s pianist-in-residence is tonight joined by Markus Placci on violin, Lila Brown on viola, and Rhonda Rider on cello for two concerts. Tonight at 7:30 pm, Brahms’ first and third piano quartets (limited tickets remaining). Tomorrow at 7:30 pm, Schubert’s String Trio in B-flat major and Brahms’ second piano quartet. In the Morris Recital Hall. There will be a post-show discussion after tomorrow’s performance.
And the Tuesday poem.
You lose friends to both
death and unusually lively
withdrawal, as well as give
some up, as anticipated,
to misunderstanding. You
leave those you assured
you would not leave and,
too, people have left
you in silence and without
reason but presumably
because of your intensity,
which you have long heard
from friends, never lovers,
for whom it was the draw.
When you leave you rarely
think about those left, so
perhaps it is like that for
those who leave you:
typically no story, with
every tensile explanation
partial, each narrative
convenient, and changing.
You reserve the secrets
of theirs you remember,
pray occasionally for their
families, and praise silently
some whistle of generosity
you witnessed. You forget
the contours slowly, in
the long second leaving,
neutrality a structure
you learned to glamorize,
the way you have come to
imagine doors as rectangular.
Under limits of the boxy
entry, you think of cities
as grids, describe a bird as
the tint of ink, forgetting
that ink can be any color.
— “Surviving Inklings” by Cindy Juyoung Ok
See you tomorrow.
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