Daybreak Tuesday 8/24/21

GOOD MORNING, UPPER VALLEY!

Let's just let the weather folks call it: "Tuesday is looking toasty." High pressure's moving in, and as what's left of what's now called Tropical Depression Henri exits east, dewpoints should drop a tiny bit. Even so, it's going to be warm—highs in the upper 80s—and humid, with cloudy skies turning mostly sunny. It'll be warm and muggy tonight, too, with fog probably developing in the favored spots.Upper Valley towns to take in $15 million in federal relief funds. The money, part of the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan Act, will go toward infrastructure projects, rebuilding rainy day funds, and other municipal efforts put on hold by the pandemic, reports Tim Camerato in the Valley News. Lebanon, Claremont, Hanover, and Hartford will each receive over $1 million; the article includes a handy chart of amounts due each town on both sides of the river.As he brings locally grown grain back to the Upper Valley, Fairlee farmer experiments. Mike Snow, who raised various grains in Virginia before moving to his family's place in Post Mills, is renting six acres of land in Fairlee—where, writes Li Shen in Sidenote, he's growing spring wheat, rye, and oats, and selling to local bakers. But just as important, he's using regenerative agriculture techniques—focusing on soil health—to try to figure out "what a stable regenerative system looks like in Vermont," he tells Shen. She details both what he's up to and what regenerative ag is about.“Scooping the air toward your nose when someone takes a pie out of the oven.” That's kind of what a snake does when it flicks the air with its tongue, and Northern Woodlands' Elise Tillinghast has a fine pic as the fourth week of August in the woods rolls around. You'll also find some beautiful cardinal flower on the banks of the Connecticut; a yellow garden spider—which does some interesting design work on its web; a perch of barn swallows; and some attractive-looking and toxic blue cohosh berries.High on Mt. Mansfield, a shifting bird population. For years, Chris Rimmer and his colleagues at WRJ's VT Center for Ecostudies have been tracking the Bicknell's thrush, a tiny songbird that migrates between the northeast's high peaks and the Caribbean, as a gauge of climate change. VTDigger's Emma Cotton went along on a recent foray, which yielded no Bicknells but a variety of birds usually found lower down. “Some of these birds that we see here, and we’re kind of surprised to find them here—you expect that’ll be a more common occurrence” as forests change, says VCE's Ryan Rebozo."Crickets murmur, the undercurrent of dawn, September's preamble." In his new digs up on Hurricane Hill in WRJ, writer and naturalist Ted Levin looks out and sees—or, more accurately, hears—the coming of autumn. "As much as I love to travel to remote corners of the continent," he muses as he works on staining his deck, "if I have to be stuck at home (again) as I was for more than a year, I'll sharpen my senses on my new homeground, be thankful for the occasional eagle, the companionable chickadee, the lemon-colored finch. And I'll tune my strings to the lullaby of the seasons."Just friends and neighbors helping one another. For a series on the 10th anniversary of Tropical Storm Irene's rampage through Vermont, VTDigger's Ashley DeLeon talks to South Royalton's Geo Honigford, whose Hurricane Flats Farm was inundated as the White River surged down its valley. Honigford was able to move his equipment to higher ground, but his fields were destroyed—as were the homes and businesses of neighbors all around. Honigford talks about the volunteer recovery effort he helped coordinate in town.Peterborough NH hit by two cyber-scams, loses $2.3 million. First, Daniela Allee reports on NHPR, the criminals—apparently based overseas—posed as local school district staff and intercepted a transfer from the town to the district; then, a few weeks later, they stole a payment intended for contractors working on a bridge. “These criminals were very sophisticated and took advantage of the transparent nature of public sector work to identify the most valuable transactions and focus their actions on diverting those transfers,” the town says in a press release. It's unclear whether insurance will cover the losses.Expect extreme heat, flooding, and sea-level rise. Those are the takeaways for New Hampshire from the new report issued earlier this month by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, writes Amanda Gokee in New Hampshire Bulletin. Extremely hot days will increase, and both coastal and inland flooding will become a regular thing. Intriguingly, Gokee reports, perceptions of changes that are already occurring seem to have more to do with political belief than reality, a UNH climate scientist has found.VT, NH organic dairy farmers to lose Horizon Organic as buyer for their milk. The word came in letters last week from global food giant Danone, which bought Horizon five years ago, ending contracts with 79 small- and medium-sized farmers around the northeast as of August, 2022. The move, reports Emma Cotton in VTDigger, leaves the farmers with few, if any options for selling their milk. “Their businesses are threatened with this decision,” says VT Ag Secretary Anson Tebbetts. "In 30 years, I’ve never had to pick up so much trash.” That, believe it or not, is the Appalachian Trail crew leader who helped construct a famed section in Virginia known as the Roller Coaster. In The Washington Post, Lizzie Johnson writes that people's urge to get out during the pandemic has brought crowds in record numbers to the AT—along with overflowing parking lots, trash, dog waste, and ever-widening trails. The "world’s longest hiking-only footpath," she writes, has become "a linear version of Costco on a Saturday."The most underrated material in the modern world? Concrete. Bear with me—or, rather, bear with Ed Conway, the economics editor at Britain's Sky News, who's put together an astonishingly interesting Twitter thread on the stuff. Starting with the point that every minute of every day, "construction firms around the world pour out the equivalent of more than 200,000 bathtubs of concrete. Every minute." Especially in China. Plus: how cement reacts with water to create concrete; why it's so strong; what the Romans did with it (before the recipe was forgotten); and lots more. Do geek out."Mom what's dad doin'?" "He's a dam fool. Let's go." That's just one of the many—many—amused comments on this clip of a ram who happens to come across a tetherball on a forest path in New Zealand and Just. Can't. Let. It. Go. It's from 2015 but hey, can 19 million viewers looking for fun be wrong?

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Don't think I spend my nights broodingabout yourfreckled lips, smeared with fig jam.Or your velvetyear lobes.  The way they taste of sea salt and celerynever occupies my mind for hours at a time....I am merelyrecalling last night's dream, in which P.F. demandedI writea poem entitled, "The History of English Lettuces."This isn't it.—From "Denial," by Amy Gerstler, in her 2004 collection Ghost Girl.See you tomorrow.

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