GOOD MORNING, UPPER VALLEY!
Okay, now there's some sun. Yesterday's cold front didn't quite scour the skies as predicted, but high pressure began building in yesterday and though various spots around the region will start out foggy this morning, things will brighten up as the morning wears on. Temps in the mid or upper 70s again today, calm winds, and clear skies tonight as temps drop to either side of 50.Just hanging out in the garden. An orb weaver (thanks, Ted!) "guarding the flowers," as Sally Duston writes from Thetford.Woman treated for rabies after gray fox attack in N. Thetford. Ordinarily, VT game warden Jeff Whipple tells Frances Mize in the Valley News, attacks by rabid animals occur when a person approaches the animal; in this case, "that fox just came out of nowhere and bit her on the arm." Yesterday, VT Fish & Wildlife and the Thetford police found and euthanized a gray fox, though Whipple says, "We can’t say it was 100% the same one." Thetford police chief Michael Scruggs tells Mize he's asked to be notified of animals acting strangely. “As animals are moving about, we don’t need this disease to spread,” he says.Hartford names new town manager. Yesterday, the town announced that at this evening's selectboard meeting, the board plans to sign a contract with John Haverstock, a former lawyer and town councilor in CT who spent 14 years as town manager in Pittsford, VT before stepping down in 2022. In all, the search committee sifted through 55 candidates before making its choice. “John really distinguished himself based on his previous experience as a town manager, his knowledge of Vermont local government, and his collegial personality," board chair Mike Hoyt says in the release.The fate of the Thetford Center Village Store depends on finding a buyer. And that's going to be tough. Because as much as someone harboring dreams of running their own little general store might be tempted, writes Nick Clark in Sidenote, the store's got a couple of strikes against it. For one thing, the gas pumps and underground tanks were removed last year by the gasoline company that had supplied them—making banks less likely to lend to any potential buyer, Clark notes. The building needs extensive work, its septic system is small, and there's concern that the post office at the rear may close.Meanwhile, Dan & Whit's is about to hit the big screen. Carla Kimball, a photographer and dancer, recently finished Heart of the Town, a short new documentary about the Norwich mainstay. "One might think there is not much new to say about it," writes Susan Apel in Artful. But Kimball’s film "focuses on the connections between the store and the community exemplified during pandemic times," with footage and interviews with locals who stepped in to help it keep going. Its Saturday premiere in the D&W parking lot has had to be postponed, Kimball said yesterday, so she has put the film online for all to see.SPONSORED: Broaden your horizons this fall! Please consider joining Adventures in Learning, a welcoming and intellectually stimulating community of lifelong learners at Colby-Sawyer College. This fall, AIL presents ten unique courses on topics including history, literature, religion, movies, and sports – something for everyone! Registration for fall term is open. Most courses begin the week of 9/19. You can learn more at the burgundy link and register here. Sponsored by Adventures in Learning.Well, ha! You'd think that after a couple of weeks off I'd return sharp as a tack, ready to parse the slightest nuances of public policy. But nah. To amend what I wrote yesterday, the Lebanon City Council last week didn't nix the Patch Orchards roads-for-trail proposal, though a majority of council members had said they'd oppose it; instead, they opted not to vote on whether or not to accept it. This had the same practical effect for now, but as Mayor Tim McNamara put it that night, also gave "implicit direction to our staff to go back and keep talking." "We will see where we go from here," he added. Thanks, PV!Should West Windsor's cannon be returned to Hampden, MA? For two decades, the cannon—probably cast in Sweden sometime in the 17th or early 18th century and maybe used on a Dutch ship plying the Connecticut River in colonial days—has sat in front of W. Windsor town hall. A bid to remove it set Christina Dolan, a former college and high school history teacher who's just launched a new monthly focused on the area, the Browntown Lowdown, looking into its past. There's lots of mystery, but one certainty is that Danny Knowles, a longtime resident who died in 2003, dug it up and brought it to town after tripping on it in a field in Hampden. It "should be returned," Dolan writes.Faced with millions in flood repairs to golf course, Quechee Lakes Landowners Association levies surprise fee on members. The “emergency special assessment," reports John Lippman in the VN, will amount to $2,150 if paid all at once, or $2,600 if paid in two installments over a year. And while many members will be able to afford the charge without blinking, longtime resident Honey Donegan tells Lippman that others are "no longer working and are dependent on whatever savings we have and Social Security." File this one away: advice from Dartmouth and other preservation experts on minimizing damage to books and documents affected by flooding. You may remember that after the July floods, volunteers from the Dartmouth Library proved invaluable in helping the Strafford Historical Society deal with the aftermath of a flooded basement at the Justin Morrill Homestead, where the society was storing photos and documents. Dartmouth News' Sarah Taylor tells the story of what happened—and follows up with librarians' recommendations. Starting with: don't store stuff you value in basements or attics.Speaking of too much water: "I would say this summer's been a bummer." That's the professional opinion of Alexandra Branton, a weather observer at the Mount Washington Observatory. She was one of several experts NHPR's Adriana Martinez-Smiley talked to in order to figure out why it's been so rainy in New England this summer. Partly it's climate change, but it's also that the region has seen a lot of low pressure systems, thanks to an unusual summertime negative phase of something known as the North Atlantic Oscillation—and high pressure elsewhere keeping that low pressure in place.NH pushes public transparency forward. For starters, Gov. Chris Sununu recently signed legislation requiring public bodies to review sealed minutes no later than 10 years after they were last sealed, Annmarie Timmins reported recently in NH Bulletin. At the moment, once sealed they can remain so forever without any move to revisit the question. And then last Friday, the state supreme court boosted the state's right-to-know law in a ruling against Nashua, where a city official had denied a request for email correspondence because it would require two hours to search through backup tapes, Timmins reports.What does a museum—or a person—do with an ethical question mark? Granite Geek's David Brooks, who inherited an African ankle weight from a relative, speaks with NH museum experts about the options. Sometimes records are sparse or non-existent. In other cases, the age and origin of the item show it was likely looted or “collected” from Native Americans, Holocaust victims, or another country. That may be ending. “To the best of my knowledge, everything the Hood has is legal,” says director John Stomberg, “but that’s not a strict enough criteria any longer. We want to make sure we’re ethical as well.”For the first time in 8 years, mosquitoes in VT test positive for Eastern equine encephalitis. So far, it's only been found in mosquitoes collected in Grand Isle and Franklin counties, reports VT Public's Brittany Patterson; the disease has no treatment or vaccine and is fatal in about one-third of human cases. It was last found in the state in 2015. And in case you're keeping track, West Nile was also recently found in mosquitoes in the state.And where are you from? In The Washington Post (gift link), Andrew Van Dam examines where doctors, writers, and visual artists come from. NY State, for instance, produces more doctors than any other in the US. But of more local interest, it turns out that Vermont leads the states for the highest share of both writers and visual artists as a percentage of the workforce—though DC outranks it for writers. Grasping for a reason, Van Dam writes that VT, “is pretty much what you’d get if you crossed artistic Taos with the less real but much more murderous town of Cabot Cove, Maine” (the town in Murder, She Wrote).I'll see your "rock the baby" and raise you... whatever the heck this is. There are people who think Hajime Miura is the greatest yoyo-er ever, though it wouldn't be hard to get an argument going in elite yoyo circles. Whatever. He's been world champion multiple times, and at the World Yo-Yo Championship finals Sunday in Osaka, he threw down this routine in the discipline known as 3A, which is two-handed string tricks done with two yoyos.The Tuesday Vordle. With a word from yesterday's Daybreak.
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At 6:30 this evening, Fairlee Community Arts hosts Jerry Grimo and the East Bay Jazz Sextet on the town common. The band, which got its start in Rhode Island in the mid-'70s, is made up of musicians from all over New England (Grimo himself is from Windsor, VT) who hold forth on everything from swing to the blues to the jazz classics.
At 7 this evening, the Enfield Shaker Museum hosts NH historian and writer Steve Taylor for a talk on "New Hampshire’s Long Love-Hate Relationship with Agricultural Fairs." Taylor, who also spent a quarter-century as the state's agriculture commissioner, will trace the history of agricultural fairs from their birth in what is now Londonderry in 1722 through their disreputable (and popular) decades to today.
And also at 7, the Norwich Bookstore this evening hosts Dartmouth physicist, astronomer, and philosopher Marcelo Gleiser, reading from and talking about his new book, The Dawn of a Mindful Universe: A Manifesto for Humanity's Future. In a book that ranges across the universe and discoveries from Copernicus to the last few years, Gleiser argues for viewing earth and the life it's nurtured as rare and precious—and reminds us that it's still the only place we know in the universe that harbors life.
And the Tuesday poem...
All yesterday it poured, and all night long I could not sleep; the rain unceasing beatUpon the shingled roof like a weird song, Upon the grass like running children’s feet.And down the mountains by the dark cloud kissed, Like a strange shape in filmy veiling dressed,Slid slowly, silently, the wraith-like mist, And nestled soft against the earth’s wet breast.But lo, there was a miracle at dawn! The still air stirred at touch of the faint breeze,The sun a sheet of gold bequeathed the lawn, The songsters twittered in the rustling trees.And all things were transfigured in the day, But me whom radiant beauty could not move;For you, more wonderful, were far away, And I was blind with hunger for your love.
—
, "Summer Morn in New Hampshire"
See you tomorrow.
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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