Daybreak Tuesday, 2/3/26

Mostly sunny, a bit warmer. We’re starting cold today, in the minuses, but with high pressure still in control for much of the day it looks like we’ll climb into the upper 20s by mid-afternoon. A weak low is coming through tonight, bringing some clouds and keeping overnight lows above zero for a change.

Ice storms, northern lights, and lots of winter scenes. It’s been a cold start to winter, but that hasn’t kept Etna photographer Jim Block house-bound. He caught the northern lights from Hanover, the ice storm from Etna, striking slants of light, and of course, birds in flight, including a tufted titmouse after the ice storm, a striking female purple finch, and a klatch of mourni

Lost Woods is back! After his well-deserved January break, Lebanon’s DB Johnson has turned his characters’ attention to winter—and Henry’s decision to celebrate New Year’s in March.

Maybe someone’ll buy a brick to be engraved “Tanzi’s”? On Sunday, the Upper Valley Business Alliance, along with a raft of local partners, launched a brickraising campaign to help fund what will eventually become Ledyard Park, a small pocket park on Main St. in the Hanover space fronting Bean’s Art Store. As Susan Apel writes in Artful, they’re offering the public a chance to buy bricks ($300 or $600 a pop) to be engraved and then installed in the park’s seating area. As Susan points out, that spot is where 48 ½ S. Main Street once stood—Tanzi’s grocery, launched by Angelo Tanzi in 1897 and run by his three sons until they shut its doors in 1969.

Proposed zoning changes see new Leb “central business district” around Centerra. Overall, writes Clare Shanahan in the Valley News, the proposals to be taken up by the city council tomorrow evening see the 120 corridor to the Hanover line as “an emerging third village center” in the city, in addition to downtown and West Leb. The zoning changes would add multi-family housing and office development around Etna and Heater roads, and more intense housing and commercial development around Centerra, including “community centers, health clubs, hotels, museums, offices, retail, theaters and restaurants.” The changes only need council backing to move ahead.

SPONSORED: Celebrate the Hood Museum’s winter exhibitions! Learn about what’s new on view, discover upcoming programs, and enjoy an evening of in-gallery exploration, music, refreshments, and remarks from Museum Director John R. Stomberg. Join us for our Winter Opening Reception this Friday, February 6, 5:00–6:30 pm. Sponsored by the Hood Museum.

“The sight of an animal reminiscent of an oversized, grizzled rat in a chicken house…would set off alarm bells in any chicken-owner's head….” But is the alarm justified? asks Li Shen in Sidenote—coming on the heels of several opossum-in-a-coop sightings in Thetford. They do eat eggs and animals that can’t get away, including sick chickens, she writes, but mostly they’re “opportunistic feeders and scavengers that consume insects, slugs, earthworms, fruits and berries, pet food, chicken food, and whatever they fancy in the compost pile.” Also: ticks, at least groomed from their own bodies. Lots more opossum lore at the link.

A snowflake thermometer. What determines the shape of a snowflake? “It is the temperature at which a crystal forms — and to a lesser extent the humidity of the air,” writes Mary Holland on her Naturally Curious blog. “Contrary to the belief that it can get too cold for snowflakes to form, snowflakes can form at any temperature as long as there is moisture in the air.” To illustrate her point, she uses a “thermometer” made up of snowflake images take by Snowflake Bentley at different temperatures—it’s a beauty, though as she points out, it doesn’t strictly line up with a crystal-shape chart she also posts. But hey, we’re talking art here. Thanks, LM!

SPONSORED: An unforgettable Valentine’s gift! The BHS Hanover choruses are offering in-person deliveries of Singing Valentines on Friday, Feb. 13 and Saturday, Feb. 14, 8 am-8 pm, within a 25-mile radius of Hanover.  Singers will arrive with a silk rose, a card with the purchaser's personal message, and a small bag of chocolates. We deliver to private homes, job sites, schools, restaurants, etc. We also offer virtual Singing Valentines sent via email anywhere in the world, arriving at 12:01 am EST on the 14th.  The short video Valentine includes an introduction with your words and a song of your selection. Hit the burgundy link for details. Sponsored by BHS Hanover.

French, Polish, Greek, Finnish, Punjabi, Afrikaans, Farsi, Strafford, Thetford… Steve Taylor’s look in the Valley News at the languages (or, in the case of the last two, dialects) of the Upper Valley is filled with history and current events you probably didn’t know. From Polish and French mill workers in Claremont and Lebanon to Finnish families in Newport and Enfield, he traces the industrial-era immigration history of the region through its churches and schools. These days, there’s an entire UN of languages in Lebanon’s ELL classes for both kids and adults. And those dialects? “Sharply attuned ears” could tell the difference between Lyme and Piermont, Strafford and Thetford.

NH and owner of state’s largest private forest reach agreement to boost logging on the land. It’s been an issue because, as NHPR’s Kate Dario reports, the owner of the 146,000-acre Connecticut Lakes Headwaters Working Forest is a carbon offset company that “curbed logging in favor of letting trees grow in order to sell the carbon they stored” for emissions offsets. This left North Country loggers and others worried about declining work. Now, Dario reports, the company will increase the average annual timber harvest to 30,000 cords per year—and guarantee timber tax revenues to host towns even if the harvest falls short.

NH legislators, school districts at loggerheads over open enrollment. As Jeremy Margolis writes in the , “As state lawmakers race to pass a new law mandating open enrollment among public schools, local school district leaders are engaged in a counter-effort to adopt policies that block students from leaving the district under the state’s current open enrollment law.” The law legislators are hoping to enact would allow any public school student in the state to go to any other public school in the state—and take tuition dollars along. A lot of districts are worried that the result will be devastating. New London and Wilmot are among a set that have passed policies allowing it, but capping students who can do it at zero. Margolis explains.

NH saw third fastest-growing median household income in the country, 1970-2023. That’s based on a new Urban Institute report that compared inflation-adjusted state median household incomes in those years. “We think of one U.S. economy,” Brady Meixell, co-author of the report, tells Governing magazine’s Carl Smith. “But the data are showing not quite 50 economies, but states moving in very different directions.” Only UT and CO saw greater growth than NH’s 62.2 percent. VT, meanwhile, was in the middle of the pack, at 38.7 percent growth. Only WV saw household income drop.

But NH isn’t one economy, either. For one thing, the NH Fiscal Policy Institute writes in a new report based on just-released census data from 2025, Rockingham County on the Seacoast “had a median household income of about $118,300. In contrast, Coos County, the northernmost and least populous county, had a median household income of about half that amount, at $57,700.” Coos has the state’s highest poverty rate, at 13.2 percent, followed by Grafton and Sullivan counties with 10.4 and 10.1 percent, respectively, “higher than the statewide poverty rate of 7.2 percent” for the five years from 2020-2024. More takeaways at the link.

Nearly a half-century of Olympics sportscasting began when Peter Graves called baseball games through his bedroom window. With a mic and amplifier no less. "I don’t recall anyone telling me to shut it off,” the legendary Thetford broadcaster writes in a new memoir. “I was hooked.” Graves, who grew up in Bennington, got his official start for ABC with the 1980 Olympics in Lake Placid because, as it happened, he knew xc star Bill Koch, writes VTDigger’s Kevin O’Connor in a look at Graves’s book, I Almost Made It, published last summer by Green Mountain Press. Graves will be watching from the sidelines this year.

Murder and martyrdom in the Everglades. In 1905, Guy Bradley, the country’s first game warden, was found floating in a small boat near Cape Sable, FL, dead of a gunshot wound. Bradley, writes Mike Kane in The Bitter Southerner, was in charge of protecting birds from the rampant slaughter that was decimating their numbers. In “Plume,” Kane tells how poachers hunted plumage and hides to adorn hats for the wealthy fashionistas of the Gilded Age, nearly wiping out some species. Some 120 years later, Kane and photographer Teague Kennedy trace Bradley’s path through the hell that is July in the Everglades: alligators, mosquitoes, water moccasins, pythons, panthers … 

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
Rooted Gardens’ Krystyna Oszkinis talks ecological landscape design with the Hanover Garden Club. She’ll cover “the steps she takes to create a new garden or renovate an existing space—from the client’s initial garden inquiry to planting day. Krystyna will also share some of her favorite plants that serve as “problem solvers” for common gardening challenges in the Upper Valley, such as clay soil and deer pressure.” 1 pm at the Montshire as well as via Zoom.

“Cybersecurity Awareness” at the Howe Library. Emily McGovern of The ATOM Group—which manages NH’s Municipal Cyber Defense System—will lead a training session “tailored for the public to educate individuals about cybercrimes and frauds targeting New Hampshire. Participants will gain knowledge on recognizing, avoiding, and responding to cyber threats, ensuring a safer and more confident digital experience.” 4 pm in the Mayer Room as well as online.

The Dartmouth Political Union hosts Scott Jennings and Ana Navarro for a debate on the future of the Republican Party. Jennings, the conservative CNN commentator, and Navarro, a GOP strategist, CNN commentator, and co-host of The View, will talk over everything from the party’s emerging leaders to the impact of Donald Trump on the party’s identity to the role media hosts should play within the party. 6:30 pm in Filene Auditorium and online.

At the Norwich Inn, Suds and Science and “Living in Meerkat Society: Grief, Lies and Social Behavior in Animals”. The VT Center for Ecostudies’ monthly science hangouts start up again tonight, with VCE’s Dana Williams telling stories about her research into meerkats and their “complex and dramatic social lives” in the Kalahari, as well as about animal behavior more generally. 7 pm.

The Tuesday poem.

Now we will count to twelve
and we will all keep still
for once on the face of the earth,
let’s not speak in any language;
let’s stop for a second,
and not move our arms so much.

It would be an exotic moment
without rush, without engines;
we would all be together
in a sudden strangeness.

Fishermen in the cold sea
would not harm whales
and the man gathering salt
would not look at his hurt hands.

What I want should not be confused
with total inactivity.
Life is what it is about;
I want no truck with death.

If we were not so single-minded
about keeping our lives moving,
and for once could do nothing,
perhaps a huge silence
might interrupt this sadness
of never understanding ourselves…

Now I’ll count up to twelve
and you keep quiet and I will go.

— From “Keeping Quiet”, by Pablo Neruda.

See you tomorrow.

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