GOOD MORNING, UPPER VALLEY!
Light snowfall. How much will depend on where you live—more south of I-89 than north—and at the moment, the weather folks think that the "light nature and fluff factor" of the snow will keep impacts on the mild side. High today is music to a skier's ear—mid-20s—and then down into the low teens tonight. Winds today from the south.Daybreak where you live. This photo of first light on Mt. Monadnock arrived the other day from Sally Collier in Dublin, NH. It got me thinking.... Daybreak's now got readers all over VT, NH, the US, and the world, most connected in some way to the Upper Valley. So what's daybreak like where you live? Send a recent photo to [email protected], make it crisp and clear so people enjoy it, and let me know where and when you took it. Just type "Daybreak where I live" in the subject line. Let's see what the early-morning world looks like!Meanwhile, in Lyme the other day...Rebecca Lovejoy looked out the window and found a barred owl sitting on a tree, just outside. "Initially it was mobbed by a few blue jays, but they quickly tired of this and left it alone," she writes. "It sat quietly for a few hours while I worked on a jigsaw puzzle and kept an eye on it." Here's a minute-long video of the owl sitting peacefully, as the wind shifts the branches around it. "I have not yet mastered the video function, but with some luck I happened to capture the sense of peace and contentment this gorgeous creature brought," Rebecca writes.Among the local businesses doing just fine, thanks: Banks. The Valley News's John Lippman notes that both Ledyard and Mascoma "emerged from 2020 in exceptionally strong shape." "The year for community banks ended much better than many of us thought it would," Mascoma CEO Clay Adams tells him. Fees from a boom in mortgages, households and businesses depositing federal stimulus funds, the PPP loans they handled, depositors saving the money they're not spending on eating out or travel...The Skiway, too... Season pass sales are up 15 percent over last year, writes The Dartmouth's Mike Hanrahan—in fact, they had to shut down sales in December because they'd reached their limit. General manager Mark Adamczyk also credits strong interest—especially among Upper Valleyites—in the new uphill ski policy, which lets people hike or snowshoe to the top and then ski down, thus avoiding the lifts. The ski hill has sold 150 uphill passes so far this year, compared to 23 last year.But many women whose jobs have been affected by the pandemic? Not as much. The VN's Nora Doyle-Burr looks at some of the women who add up to the big picture, which is that women in the twin states have been disproportionately affected by job loss during the pandemic (especially in VT). It's a mix of the kinds of industries most affected by job cuts and added child care and learning-from-home demands. Talking to women around the Upper Valley, Doyle-Burr finds the impact has been emotional as well as financial."I think that for some people, it has happened too fast. And maybe it has, I don’t know. I think that’s up to the people of Hartford to determine that.” That's Hartford Selectboard member Joe Major talking to VPR's Howard Weiss-Tisman about political changes in town that, among other things, have brought questions of racism, misogyny, and classism to the fore. They've hit the spotlight since Alicia Barrow, one of the board's Black members, resigned two weeks ago. "In my 37 years of life, I have never been told to go back to Africa until I joined the select board,” she tells Weiss-Tisman.Best doughnuts in New Hampshire? Muriel's in Leb. That comes from no less a source than Food & Wine, which has come out with a list of what it calls the "finest fried dough treats in America." "Francis [Maville] reportedly liked to joke that they chose the name Muriel's Donuts so people knew who to blame if the business failed, but as anybody in this busy corner of Grafton County can tell you, it did not," David Landsel wrote on Friday. Best in VT? Cider doughnuts at Cold Hollow and at Shelburne Farms (cool, but he could have tried a little harder). Two warnings: long load time, and don't read this when you're hungry.With Aubuchon space in local hands, Bradford's Main Street steadies. After sitting vacant for a year, reports Lippman, the old hardware space sold at auction to Valley Floors owner Ryan Chase, who has embarked on something of a listening tour to decide what to do with it. Along with Stacey Thomson's relaunch of the old Perry's Oil property and Monique Priestley's revitalization of Hill's 5 & 10 into the Space on Main, Lippman notes, three of Main Street's anchor spaces are seeing "a serious effort among a new entrepreneurial generation" to revive the town's business district.More than 4,000 hand-formed ceramic beads. That's what make up the large image of an Indigenous woman staring out from behind a window of the Hood in Hanover. In Junction mag, Hazel-Dawn Dumpert points out that it's the only work from the museum's current Native American ceramics exhibit that's visible, "a potent taste of the work that waits within"—though the Hood, of course, is closed to the public. Each of the beads in "Every One (#MMIWQT Bead Project)" represents a missing or murdered indigenous woman, girl, queer and/or trans person.Those spiders you sometimes see crawling across the snow? They can remain active until their body temp reaches 25 F, writes naturalist Mary Holland. Most spiders, she notes, crawl under leaf litter as winter sets in, shut down their metabolism, and go dormant; others mate, lay eggs and die. But some manage to make a go of it through the winter, though because their metabolisms ramp up to deal with the cold, "starvation [is] as big a threat as freezing." Red Bark Phenomenon. Such a great band name, don't you think? But no, writes Northern Woodlands' Elise Tillinghast, it's actually green algae with orange-red pigments that seems to be affecting northern hemlocks, possibly a result of climate change. This second week in February out in the woods also finds both short-tailed and long-tailed weasels in their winter white, hoar frost the breath of denned animals rimming their den entrances, nuthatches plying the snow-less undersides of branches in search of food, and gnaw marks on trees as porcupines get through winter by feeding on wood.21 vehicles say slow down in snow and ice. That's how many were involved in crashes yesterday on I-93 over near Franconia Notch. It all started when state troopers arrived at a crash on the southbound side. Within minutes, the state police reported, two troopers' cars and a liquor commission investigator's car were struck by motorists. Then other cars wound up involved in separate crashes. "The roadway, at the time of the crashes, had been covered with a light coating of ice and snow, making for very slippery, yet manageable, driving conditions," the NHSP say in a press release.Pilot housing mediation program to launch in Claremont. The federal moratorium on evictions is due to expire in March, and NH's circuit courts are getting ready by launching an effort to mediate disputes between landlords and tenants, reports NHPR's Daniela Allee. The idea, says the courts' Margaret Huang, is to create an informal setting with a trained, neutral facilitator in which each side can sort through what's important to them and, ideally, reach an agreement before it gets to court. Claremont and Concord courts will try it first. “Sounds leave no fossils, no isotopic signatures. For the most part, they’re here one millisecond and gone the next." That's Dartmouth biologist Matt Ayres talking to NHPR's Annie Ropeik about a new effort to record the sounds of the Hubbard Brook Experimental Forest—maybe the one swath of data that hasn't been gathered and analyzed in scientists' remarkable 66-year history of studying the impact of environmental changes on one swath of the northern forest. In a bow to the pandemic, the sound effort is remote: 30 recorders all turn themselves on and off at the same time each day.$1 billion. That's how much the state of VT is planning to spend on IT projects over the next five years, writes Amanda Gokee in VTDigger, even after trimming proposed projects to a mere 1,100. Upgrades are clearly needed—both the DMV and the labor department use systems that date back to the 1970s. Last week's Labor data breach, Gokee writes, came because people had to manipulate data "that more modern technology would easily sort in a matter of seconds." The Scott administration is trying to create a single tech fund that would allow it to set priorities, rather than have agencies compete. More mandalas. Remember that app in Friday's Daybreak? Turns out that Sharon's Ben Servoz, an IT guy at Dartmouth, built one a while ago, too. Free, works on mobile, does tessellations. Oh. Sorry. Now your day's shot...You forgot your luuuuunch! There are home videos...and then there's this. Daniel Hashimoto is a Hollywood special effects guy, so he brings some extra super powers to messing around with videos of his kids. Ignore the headline on this Twitter compilation: This is actually a few years old. But you know what? It's never going to get old. Make sure the sound's on. (Thanks, GR!)
Let's catch up a bit!
Dartmouth reports 5 active cases among students (down 1 over the last 4 days) and 2 among faculty and staff (down 3). In the meantime, 13 students and 5 faculty/staff are in quarantine because of travel or exposure, while 5 students and 12 faculty/staff are in isolation awaiting results or because they tested positive.
NH reported 121 new cases yesterday for a cumulative total of 68,499, or a gain of 1,378 over the last four days. There were 21 new deaths over that time, for a total of 1,106. Meanwhile, 179 people are hospitalized (down 30). The current active caseload stands at 3,245 (down 854). The state reports 176 active cases in Grafton County (own 24 over the last four days), 119 in Sullivan (down 34), and 292 in Merrimack (down 70). In town-by-town numbers, the state says Claremont has 69 active cases (down 4), Newport has 18 (no change), Hanover has 13 (down 3), Lebanon has 10 (up 2), Canaan has 9 (no change), Rumney has 9 (up 1), Haverhill has 7 (up at least 3), Enfield has 6 (up 1), Grantham has 5 (no change), and Charlestown has 5 (down 5). Warren, Dorchester, Plainfield, Cornish, Croydon, Sunapee, Unity, and Newbury have 1-4. Wentworth, Springfield, New London, and Wilmot are off the list.
VT reported 143 new cases yesterday, bringing it to a total case count of 13,046, which is a gain of 543 since we last met. There have been 2 new deaths in that time; they now number 183 all told. Meanwhile, 59 people with confirmed cases are hospitalized (down 1). Windsor County gained 29 new cases over the last four days to stand at 917 for the pandemic (with 119 over the past 14 days). Orange County had 8 new cases and is now at 445 cumulatively (with 37 cases over the past 14 days). In town-by-town numbers reported last Thursday (so they're a little out of date), Springfield added 19 new cases over the week before, Windsor gained 9, Hartford and Bradford each added 6, Royalton, Thetford, and Bethel each had 4, Norwich, Newbury, and Weathersfield each added 3, Hartland, Randolph, W. Windsor, and Pomfret had 2 apiece, and Killington, Woodstock, Strafford, and Vershire each added 1.
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At 7 this evening, VT Humanities hosts a third presentation by Meg Mott exploring our current political environment. Mott, professor of politics emerita at Emerson, looks at "Why Complex Humanity Matters." Back in another time, De Tocqueville noted, democracy afforded its citizens “poetry, eloquence, memory, the beauty of wit, the fires of imagination, [and] the depth of thought.” These days, Mott notes, there's less focus on human complexity and more on systemic oppression. She'll consider the advantages and disadvantages of highlighting group identity in electoral politics, and ask, "Is there still a place for eloquence and wit in our political strategies?"
Meanwhile, for the rest of this week you can catch the streamed version of last Saturday's staged reading of Raggedy And, the final presentation by the Chandler's Vermont Pride Theater, which ends its 10-year run after this. David Valdes' play is about what happens when the country's first female president-elect chooses a trans woman as inaugural poet, throwing her family into turmoil.
Finally, anytime before spring planting time: Upper Valley Seed Savers is a group of gardeners and farmers striving to create a local collection of seeds to support a year-round food supply. But seeds can be expensive, especially for people in financial straits right now, and they want to help. They've got a limited quantity of seeds to donate to people in the region who are having trouble getting them (link downloads their catalog and request form). They also note there's another local resource "every Upper Valley gardener should be aware of"—Solstice Seeds, which produces all the seeds in its catalog on its farm in Hartland.
If thou must love me, let it be for nought Except for love's sake only. Do not say I love her for her smile ... her look ... her way Of speaking gently, ... for a trick of thought That falls in well with mine, and certes brought A sense of pleasant ease on such a day'— For these things in themselves, Belovèd, may Be changed, or change for thee,—and love, so wrought, May be unwrought so. Neither love me for Thine own dear pity's wiping my cheeks dry,—A creature might forget to weep, who bore Thy comfort long, and lose thy love thereby! But love me for love's sake, that evermore Thou may'st love on, through love's eternity.
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Sonnets from the Portuguese
14, "If thou must love me..."
Oh, and the pigeons in that video? Genius. See you tomorrow.
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Written and published by Rob Gurwitt Banner by Tom Haushalter Poetry editor: Michael Lipson About Rob About Tom About Michael
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