GOOD MORNING, UPPER VALLEY!
Slight chance of showers this morning. Otherwise, mostly cloudy and cooler. Yesterday's system is on its way out, and the cold front behind it has made last week just a memory—at best, we'll get into the mid 50s today under mostly cloudy skis. Mid 30s tonight. Helpfully, the weather folks note, "These temperatures are around five to ten degrees cooler than seasonal normals for mid April, and this will feel particularly cold after the stretch of warm weather we have just experienced." Well, yes.Sure, the beaver's cute, but look at that water! At Bedell Bridge State Park in Haverhill late last week, Catherine Holland noticed a pair of beavers in the water toward sunset. The hot weather had brought snowmelt flooding to the fields up north, she writes, "and the waterfowl & beavers are loving it!" As captivating as the beavers were, the water patterns were just as mesmerizing.So Cornish, about that steel structure? Remember last week's item about how officials in Lyndon VT are planning to put up a steel structure to keep box trucks from taking out a covered bridge there? So, sometime on Friday, the Cornish PD wrote Sunday on FB, "parties unknown struck and damaged the Cornish Windsor Covered Bridge. There is white paint transfer, and a possible indication that it was a trailer that struck the side of the bridge." They're looking for tips. Also, they write, "if you are tempted to leave a comment that there should be cameras on the bridge, I cannot agree with you more."A footnote on that Dartmouth golf course legal case: Donor also gave course its sprinkler system. Remember yesterday's NH Bulletin story about the claim by the estate of alum Robert Keeler that Dartmouth should return his $3.8 million now that it's shut down the golf course? The Valley News's John Lippman follows up by unearthing a three-decade-old story about how Keeler and his brother, Thomas, had earlier given $675K (at least) for a new computerized sprinkler system, hailed as a technological marvel, that meant the groundskeeper no longer had to get up at 1 am to haul watering hoses.SPONSORED: Celebrate Earth Day at the Montshire this Saturday! Gather at the Montshire to take action for the Earth. Dig into composting, connect with nature through mindfulness, and learn to repair and remake common items to keep them out of the landfill. Come for hands-on activities, experts, stories, and a free raffle of a composting bucket full of Earth Day-themed products from the Montshire Museum Store! Events will run from 10:30am to 4:30pm on Saturday, April 22. Sponsored by the Montshire Museum of Science.Another Southern State inmate dies. According to the VT State Police, the unnamed 46-year-old man had been experiencing health problems and told corrections staff yesterday morning that he was having trouble breathing; he was found unresponsive in his cell around 9:30 am. In all, reports VTDigger's Ethan Weinstein, 12 people in custody at the Springfield VT prison have died since January of last year. The prison, he notes, includes an infirmary and a housing unit for elderly and chronically ill people; a new health care services provider is slated to take over July 1.Gardening for bees: the don'ts and the do's. Native bee and bumble bee populations are increasingly vulnerable, the VT Center for Ecostudies writes in a new guide, but there's a lot you can do in your yard to help out. Don't plant invasives, buy bees online, spray unnecessary pesticides, or use treated nursery plants, they suggest. And do leave leaves around, consider observing No Mow (or at least High Mow) May, and plant native plants. It even includes resources for finding native plants.Did you know that skunk cabbages create their own heat? They metabolize starch from their roots, thus protecting flowers, kick-starting their scent, and attracting pollinators. They're off to a later start this year than last, writes Northern Woodlands' Elise Tillinghast, but in this third week of April, they're out there. So are gray tree frogs, which definitely have a look. Which you can also say about newly laid frog eggs. Elise also points out a new guide to identifying amphibian eggs in vernal pools put together by the magazine and the VT Center for Ecostudies.For retirees in NH, property tax is "a central source of financial anxiety." NH residents "bear the third-highest burden in the country," the VN's Patrick Adrian wrote over the weekend, and as property assessments rise, it's getting worse. Lebanon, for instance, saw the assessed value of single-family homes jump 27 percent in 2021 after a revaluation, and apartment buildings even more, leading to higher taxes. Adrian talks to retired residents of Lebanon and Lyme about the harsh impact on their fixed incomes, and about whether the state's elderly exemption does enough to help.Is there rising homelessness among NH seniors? At a state Commission on Aging hearing yesterday, reports NHPR's Paul Cuno-Booth, a shelter manager in Portsmouth told commissioners that his organization has seen a growing number of older adults seeking help. Many of them are facing homelessness for the first time—"often because a new landlord comes in and raises the rent beyond what they can afford," Cuno-Booth writes. As a result, the organization's staff have been dealing with health needs and mobility challenges they haven't had to confront before.NH poised to require teaching cursive in elementary school. The mandate is part of a bill that passed the House last month and the Senate on Thursday; it would also require the teaching of multiplication tables by fifth grade. Backers, wrote Annmarie Timmins in NH Bulletin last week, argue that research has linked learning cursive to healthy brain development—and to being able to read the US Constitution in the original. In his Granite Geek column (burgundy link) David Brooks argues that adding cursive to the curriculum will rob teachers of time for teaching kids things they "need to learn in this bewildering era."New collaboration will pay $5,000 to VT college grads who stay in the state and work for VT employers. The effort by the state, UVM, and the VT Student Assistance Corporation is "aimed at shoring up the state’s anemic workforce," reports Seven Days' Anne Wallace Allen, and will give recipients $2,500 in each of their first two years after graduating to pay off their loans. Eligible colleges include the Vermont State College system, UVM, and private colleges such as Champlain, Middlebury, Bennington, Sterling, and Norwich.New standardized test has VT schools flummoxed and struggling. At one school, reports VTDigger's Peter D'Auria, sixth graders were unable to log in at all; fifth graders were repeatedly rejected from the online system. State officials had touted the new system's "approach to diversity, equity and inclusion," but its actual rollout, D'Auria writes, was delayed until just a few weeks before administrators were required to implement it. White River School principal Doug Kussius says that as late as December, he was telling staff, "there's no way they're going to try to pull this off."Burlington Ben & Jerry's scoopers seek to unionize. Workers at the company's flagship store filed a petition for a union election with the National Labor Relations Board yesterday, seeking to join the same union affiliate—Workers United—that's organized hundreds of Starbucks workers in recent years. They would become the first location in the company to unionize, though back in 1998, 19 maintenance workers at a plant in St. Albans voted to do so. The union drive, writes Seven Days' Derek Brouwer, is being advised by the former Starbucks barista who touched off that drive in Buffalo two years ago.Think VT's stone walls were built to keep animals in? Nope. "Most—not every single one, but most—of the stone walls were built to fence animals out," says Jane Dorney, a geographer focused on the evolution of the VT landscape. She talks to Vermont Public's Anna Van Dine for a new Brave Little State episode about where all those stone walls out in the woods come from. Standing on a spot in Hinesburg's town forest, Van Dine travels back in time: to the glacier 20,000 years ago, the Abenaki 1,000 years ago, an early log cabin 200 years ago, stone walls a few decades after that...You can hide a scar, or you can embellish it. Most of us would chuck a broken or chipped piece of pottery or do the best we can to glue it back together and hide the seam. In Japan, there’s a belief that flaws—in pottery and people—should be celebrated and made beautiful. The BBC speaks with Hiroki Kiyokawa, a restorer in Kyoto, about the painstaking process of kintsugi, in which breaks are mended with lacquer and brushed with gold. The crack becomes the most beautiful part of the object, and the object itself is somehow more precious than when it was flawless.The Tuesday Vordle. With a word from yesterday's Daybreak.Daybreak doesn't get to exist without your support. Help it keep going by hitting the maroon button:
Starting this morning and running through the weekend, a group of monastics from Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh's Deer Park Monastery in California will be visiting Dartmouth, with a full schedule of events open to the public. There will be guided meditations, a public talk today on "Happiness Is Here and Now: Engaged Mindfulness in a Complex and Changing World" at 4:30 in Rollins Chapel, other public talks later in the week (including one Thursday at the Hood), and a weekend-long mindfulness retreat. Full schedule here.
Today at 3:30 and again at 8 pm (and tomorrow at 5 pm and 8 pm), the Hop presents the Sicilian marionette company Figli d'Arte Cuticchio and its performance of La Storia del Soldato. Company founder Mimmo Cuticchio has been re-energizing the popular theatrical tradition of Sicilian puppetry—in this case, the story contained in Stravinsky's Histoire du Soldat of soldier who trades his violin to the Devil in return for a fortune. With Filippo Ciabatti conducting a seven-member ensemble. The show's in Dartmouth Hall 105, which has extremely limited seating that's sold out, but they've got a wait list running (at the link) for tonight and for tomorrow's two shows. Ciabatti, Italian prof Michael Wyatt, and the company will give a talk at 6:30 this evening in the Baker-Berry Library about the tradition of Sicilian puppetry.
At 5 pm today, U of Chicago historian Steven Pincus will give a talk on "Namier, Partisanship and Political Economy: The Shaping of the British Empire," focused on the British historian Lewis Namier and the role of politics in the course of the British empire. Pincus is at work on a history of the empire from roughly 1650 - 1784. In-person in Carson Hall.
And the Tuesday poem.
A bull house finch at the feeder,his body light and delicateas a cracker. Somehowa quarter-ounce of downand brain got him throughthe winter.
— "The He-linnet,"
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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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