Daybreak Tuesday, 5/26/26

Clearing, then sunny. If you’re blanketed in fog right now, it’ll clear out, and with high pressure parked to our south—for today, anyway—we’re looking at a day of full-on sun with temps getting into the low 80s. A cold front drop down from Canada late in the day, but mostly we’ll feel it in the form of gusty winds toward evening. Lows tonight in the high 50s.

Slo-mo slap. A beaver’s tail, that is. Which Peter Bloch filmed late last week, then slowed way down. As he writes, “The tail curls up, flips a streamer of water into the air, then smashes down with remarkable force. The beaver's feet flip up into the churning flying water before slipping away while the droplets spray and dance. As impressive as these tail slaps are in regular speed, it is all even MORE amazing to see THIS way.”

COO! In DB Johnson’s Lost Woods this week, Eddie speculates about what ancient auks might have sounded like, while Auk speculates about what it would be like to migrate as the seasons change—though not very far.

Norwich Selectboard member charged with financial exploitation. The felony count against Mary Layton stems from a complaint filed last summer by the daughter of well-known Hanover lawyer Bill Clauson, who died in July of Alzheimer’s and dementia and with whom Layton had lived since 2016. In an affidavit, reports the Valley News’s Alex Ebrahimi, authorities allege that Layton transferred large sums of Clauson’s money into her own account and used it to help with a divorce settlement and for other personal purposes. Layton had no comment. She’s due to be arraigned today.

Crowd turns out to dedicate new memorial in WRJ. The monument to veterans who fought in the Korean and Vietnam wars, as well as who served in both conflicts and peacetime in the years that followed, is the result of years of work by a small group of residents. WCAX’s Adam Sullivan was there on Railroad Row yesterday as veterans, schoolkids, and townspeople gathered for speakers including former WRJ VA director Gary DeGasta and Vietnam vet Rusty Sachs. “When I turned around at the podium and looked back, I was like, Wow! This community is amazing. Amazing to grow up in and amazing to see the support,” retired Army Col. Brian Bettis tells Sullivan.

Advance Transit leader exits after just a few months. Teri Palmer, who was hired by the nonprofit transit agency in January, has stepped down, AT announced in a press release on Friday. The explanation was terse: “AT and Palmer have mutually agreed to part ways, and the agency expresses its sincere gratitude for her dedicated service and leadership.” Palmer worked for a consulting firm as NH’s mobility manager before taking on the job. The AT board has appointed Ashley Manning, the organization’s chief operating officer, to take over as interim executive director.

SPONSORED: Saint-Gaudens National Historical Park is open for the 2026 Season. Saint-Gaudens National Historical Park is now open for the season. Explore the historic home of famed American sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens, stroll the beautiful grounds, and enjoy free Sunday concerts, workshops, and two new art exhibitions this year. Admission is $10, or $40 for an annual pass covering you and up to three guests all season long. Plan your visit at the burgundy link or here. Sponsored by the Saint-Gaudens Memorial.

Hanover resident barred from approaching public officials. A judge has granted stalking petitions requested by all five members of the Hanover Selectboard and Town Manager Robert Houseman against David Vincelette, reports Alex Ebrahimi in the VN. Vincelette, who lives by Mink Brook, has long accused the town of polluting its waters and “imprisoning” him by erecting a fence to keep his belongings off town property. On May 15, writes Ebrahimi, Circuit Court Judge Michael Mace ordered Vincelette to stay at least 300 feet away from all six officials for a year, and to stay out of the town’s offices—though he can participate in public meetings online.

Occasional Rooster reopens in Strafford. As you may remember, retired IRS tax lawyer Phoebe Mix opened the café late last spring in the village post office annex. She closed it in July after dissension in town over a renter she’d allowed to live upstairs. Now, writes Dave Celone on his Upper Valley VT/NH Musings Substack, Mix has reopened the café Thursdays-Sundays, 9 am-2 pm. “It reminds me of some small European village where one little house in some out-of-the-way mountain hideaway near an old stone fountain, run by a local family doing its best to share their secret recipes, serves up all the tasty calories you’ll need,” Dave writes.

SPONSORED: Alice Peck Day Memorial Hospital Express Care is here when you need it. Our Express Care team treats adults and children over the age of one for non-life-threatening conditions. And with evening and weekend hours, you get the right level of care when you need it. Get immediate care for coughs, colds, rashes, and sprains right at APD Express Care, and all without an appointment. Alice Peck Day Memorial Hospital Express Care. Part of the best health system in the region, Dartmouth Health. Sponsored by Dartmouth Health.

Grafton police force needs officers. At the moment, former Enfield police chief Roy Holland has two weeks left in an eight-week stint he undertook to help out. “They had nobody [else] to cover the town,” he tells the VN’s Sofia Langlois. “Grafton was stuck in a really kind of hard position.” It has a couple of part-time certified officers, but one lives in Florida and just fills in when he visits, and the other is in EMT school. Former chief Russell Poitras takes on administrative tasks, but he’s no longer certified. One recruit officer failed a physical exam for the police academy, and will try again in August. On average, the town’s police get one or two calls for service a day.

In VT legislature, education reform deal comes into view. Legislators from both the House and the Senate met all last week with members of Gov. Phil Scott’s administration in hopes of finding a way past Scott’s demand for mandatory school district mergers, and on Friday evening, reports VTDigger’s Ethan Weinstein, the results landed as an amendment to the reform package. Sponsored by three Senate Democrats and GOP leader Scott Beck, it backs away from mandatory mergers, instead laying out “multiple bureaucratic processes for districts to voluntarily merge.” It sets a goal of school district votes in 2028. Senators may take it up as soon as today.

Wait… Eating yams might cause twins? That’s just one of the paths that Brave Little State’s Sabine Poux goes down as she explores a listener’s question about why Sheldon, VT, has so many twins. The yam hypothesis comes from a Dutch researcher named Dorret Boomsma—and so does the suggestion that maybe twin-prone shared ancestors are at the root of it. Which, given that there are Kanes all over town, and a Kane Road, and a Kane farm, and a lot of Kane twins… As always with BLS, it’s the journey, not the destination, and Poux gives a little master class in starting with an innocent question and pursuing the multiple strands it takes to answer it engagingly.

The Monday Jigsaw on Tuesday: A colorized Ledyard Bridge. It’s a view of the bridge looking south, most likely in the late 1800s, past a plainly visible Lewiston, toward Mt. Ascutney. These days, reports Cam Cross on his Curioustorian blog, you can’t get that view: After figuring out where the photographer must have stood, he writes, “you see exactly nothing of the bridge. The trees have closed the view entirely. Mother Nature bats last.” Original photo and more on the bridge itself here.

The Tuesday Crossword. It’s Laura Braunstein’s little mini puzzle to get you revved back up for the week.

Today's Wordbreak. With a word from last Friday’s Daybreak.

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HEADS UP
Dartmouth’s Rockefeller Center hosts Rahm Emanuel. The former member of Congress, chief of staff to Barack Obama, mayor of Chicago, and ambassador to Japan will sit down with business and government prof Charlie Wheelan to talk about… well, national politics is a good bet. 5 pm in Filene Auditorium and livestreamed.

Catherine Tudish with A Thousand Souls at the Norwich Bookstore. “What a wonderful writer Catherine Tudish is, and what a marvelous novel in stories she has written, so mysterious, so complicated, so beautiful,” wrote the novelist Margot Livesey about Tudish’s latest, interwoven stories about the fictional village of Neptune, VT. “As one story opens into the next—a girl tames a bear, a boy briefly meets his father, a young woman teaches French, a sheriff loses his job—the web of connections, and our sense of this very particular place in rural Vermont, deepens.” 7 pm.

The Tuesday poem.

I am a child in the lunchroom
which is the sometimes gym
singing my known truths: I love milk

to which Tanya says If you love it so
much why don’t you marry it?
And that’s a fair point, Tanya.

Why don’t I marry this milk, why
don’t I plan an elaborate ceremony,
choose colors, invite milk’s family

and milk’s college friends to stay near,
but not with, us? Why don’t I start
picking the poems now to be read

as we wed somewhere necessarily
refrigerated? Just like a child
to think it’s so easy—that love

is a one-way act or a matter
of decision. We can’t love
what we love into loving

us. Tanya, if I could
why would I waste my time
with milk, or with you, you

whom I decidedly do not love?
I’d be out charming
my indifferent grandmothers

into expressions of genuine affection
and jewelry. I’d be deepening
a correspondence with television

and movie star Michael J. Fox
who I imagine chastely kissing
with my full and future lips,

making the sounds
I’ve seen on the screen.
Tanya, this is the smallest torture

you’ll think up for me, perfected
until junior high starts and I
am in honors classes and you

are not—forgive me this, my own
small wounding, but I am
storing these cruelties inside me

like a library dedicated
to one kind of war. I am becoming
a woman who’ll do almost anything

to be wanted. Why don’t I marry
the milk, Tanya? Ask the milk
what there is in me to love.

— “Juvenilia” by Erin Adair-Hodges

See you tomorrow.

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