Daybreak Tuesday, 3/24/26

Sun then clouds, warmer. Enjoy the morning, because according to the weather folks, today appears to be our best chance for some hours of decent sun this week. We’ll be getting into the low or mid 40s, with winds from the northwest and clouds building in this afternoon then clearing out tonight as winds shift to the west. Lows tonight in the mid 20s.

Returning to the scene of the crime. “A beautiful healthy bobcat visiting our empty chicken coop in Thetford, and a reminder that this has been a long winter for our forest friends,” writes Nadine Carter. “Unfortunately, this was days after she came shopping midday and took home our chickens.”

“The ice is melted. We gotta get down to the pond now!” Early spring has arrived in DB Johnson’s Lost Woods, and Auk and Eddie are headed out to catch tadpoles. If they can find any.

“Apparently, someone was trying to buy up all the general stores in the Upper Valley.” After a day of skiing, Dartmouth junior Leila Brady stopped off at the locally owned Lyme Country Store, got into a conversation—and learned about Ankit Patel and his bid to snap up general stores in the region. She got curious—and being part of Sophie Crane’s podcasting class at the college, had an excuse to go learn more. She made the rounds, from the Patel-owned Patterson’s in Orford to independents Chapman’s in Fairlee and the Last Chance General Store in W. Fairlee, (“The Last Stop Before the Middle of Nowhere”). She tells us what she learned in “A General Story”, the first in a two-week series of students’ audio stories from all over the Upper Valley.

The man behind “rizz,” “gyoza,” and “mud season” lives in Windsor. Not the words themselves, but their definitions in the latest revision to Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Edition, which saw the light of day last November. Michael Metivier is one of the dictionary’s lexicographers, and he spoke with the VT Standard’s Justin Bigos recently about his work—which also includes “burrata” and “popcorn” as an adjective (popcorn shrimp). “Merriam-Webster is a descriptivist dictionary in that it is trying to record how people actually use language, and not to say that something should or shouldn’t be a word that people use,” Metivier says… and then dives into “irregardless.”

With a pair of brass washers, Norwich church tower bell starts ringing again. There’s a story behind that, told by crossing guard and selectboard member Kimo Griggs to Demo Sofronas for Demo’s About Norwich blog. It began with a chance crosswalk encounter that led to his getting access to the clock tower and then to meeting up with clock-winder Chipper Ashley—”Our clock is old school, hand wound twice each week,” Griggs writes—and some time trying to figure out why the bell was no longer working. Then it turned out that a Norwich police officer’s step-dad is a clock-maker—who verified Griggs’s hunch. Plenty of photos and big-clock minutiae…

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“Forget the headlines for a while, and watch the computer-screen eagles. It’s so much more rewarding than the news.” Not surprisingly, that’s what naturalist and writer Ted Levin writes on his Another Morning in Paradise blog. He’s got VINS’s bald eagle cams set as his screen saver, watching the eagles—who trade off nest duty—and surveying the nest itself with a practiced eye. “Sticks in the nest are longer and thicker than I had suspected,” he writes. “Some forked. Some not. Many bigger and longer than a broom handle. A thick bed of grasses and forbs lines the nest cup—more flat than cup-shaped, more raft than cradle, carrying one pale freight through weather.”

A black bear mom and three yearlings emerge from hibernation. That’s the photo atop Mary Holland’s latest Naturally Curious post, and as she writes, though you’d expect them to be more than peckish after going for months without eating or drinking, it takes them a while to get back up to speed. “During this time of ‘walking hibernation’ bears eat and drink much less than normal,” she writes. “Many have lost a significant amount of body fat, and they are sluggish with reduced appetites.” Once they do get hungry again, they’ll head for forested wetlands, beaver ponds, to streamside plants—and, if you’ve been ignoring the warnings, to your bird feeder.

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Federal EPA says it will decide on NH vehicle inspection request by the end of the year. It’s the newest step in the head-twisting legal and regulatory story kicked off last year by a state law ending mandatory emission inspections—which are required under the federal Clean Air Act. The company that ran the state’s teting program sued and won a preliminary injunction in federal court, but as it appeals that decision, the state is essentially ignoring it and not enforcing inspection requirements. Now, reports NHPR’s Todd Bookman, the EPA has announced it will expedite the state’s request to opt out of emission inspections.

That patch of brown in the top right corner? That’s us. The headline atop NOAA’s “Spring Outlook” is “Drought forecasted to expand in U.S. West, parts of Plains.” And while the writeup touches on the Pacific Northwest, Great Basin, central Rockies, and Southwest (conditions getting worse) and Midwest and Atlantic seaboard (improvement in some spots), the map tells the story: From Windsor County north in VT and through all but southwest NH, drought is forecast to persist at least through the end of June. One bright spot: Rainfall-driven flooding is less of a threat.

Five Upper Valley legislators and their priorities. Three from VT, two from NH, two Republicans, three Democrats: In the VN, Sofia Langlois takes an extended look at what Lebanon Democrat Suzanne Prentiss wants to do in the NH Senate (protect rural “critical access hospitals” from independent competitors); Thetford Democrat Jim Masland’s involvement in school district boundary and consolidation issues in VT; Bradford NH Republican Dan Innis and a meat deregulation bill he’s pushing in the state Senate; Bradford VT Democratic Rep. Monique Priestley and her interest in data privacy; and Corinth Republican Rep. Michael Tagliavia and his focus on wetland regs.

An ancient way to cross the north. For decades, Blair Braverman ran sled dogs in the most challenging races on the continent, hundreds of miles—a thousand, in the Iditarod—in frigid temperatures and icy winds. In the NYT Magazine (gift link), she writes about her bond with the dogs and the landscape they travel, “a way of stepping into timelessness.” She lived in a one-room cabin without running water, raising dogs and training for races. But dogs grow old and life changes. As she faces life without her team, Braverman takes one more trip with them into the wilderness before they all retire “one by one to gentler lifestyles.”

Terrain park throwdown. The video is pretty wild: Skier Dave Sugnet miraculously avoiding a collision with a kid on a snowboard who’d wandered into a blind spot just below a jump. The debate in the comments is just as interesting: Skier’s fault? Kid’s (and parents’) fault? The National Ski Areas Assn. tells skiers and boarders “always look before you drop,” but sometimes it’s tough to see ahead. There’s general agreement, though: Sugnet’s got good reflexes.

The Tuesday Crossword. Ease your brain into the day with the Upper Valley-themed Tuesday “mini” from Dartmouth librarian and puzzle artist Laura Braunstein. 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
The Howe Library hosts “Sound Healing and Journey”. Chelsea’s Heidi Scheurer will give a talk on “the history, purpose and physics of sound healing followed by a Sound Journey—a deeply meditative experience where you are immersed in sound waves created by overtone-emitting healing instruments such as Himalayan singing bowls, gongs, monochords, drums, rattles, and chimes.” 6:30 pm in the Mayer Room.

Anne Fadiman at the Norwich Bookstore. The great author, editor, and essayist will be talking about Frog: And Other Essays with Norwich’s Jane Stetson, a lifelong friend. As always, Fadiman ranges widely in her writing, in this case from the pet frog that gives the book its title to the evolving use of pronouns, her obsession with the lives of polar explorers, and what she shares with her writing students at Yale. 7 pm.

The Tuesday Poem.

Crowded rock mountains/
clear wet rivers going white.

Lemuel points to beaver dams I can’t see.
But I trust him.
He is trying to help a small bug
fly out of our moving Saturn.

When I was born well who knows.

My favorite song plays.
It makes me cry.
May that it play forever.

I’m feeling the kind of happiness
you try to hold onto—
so lit and soft
it’s almost sadness.

Put Lonesome Crowded West on again.

— “Feeling It” by Chessy Normile, from Great Exodus, Great Wall, Great Party.

See you tomorrow.

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