GOOD MORNING, UPPER VALLEY!
Sun. High pressure to our north will be taking its own sweet time shifting off to the east the next few days, leaving us (after any lingering high clouds this morning give way) with brilliant fall skies, chilly nights, and daytime temps that will gradually warm over the course of the week. Today, we’ll get into the low 60s, with tonight’s lows dipping into the upper 30s. Light winds today from the northeast.
A people-powered barn raising. Devin Karlson has been dreaming for years of building a barn on the property he and his wife, Krista, own in Thetford. By hand. Back in April, 2025, they began cutting trees and then milling lumber, and over the winter, Devin hewed posts and beams and prepped the support structures. On Saturday, it all came together, as dozens of friends, family members, neighbors, and colleagues turned out to help them lift the supports (called “bents”) into place and anchor it all together. At the link, the barn raising in photos and in a three-minute timelapse.
Three people narrowly escape house fire in Wilder; two dogs perish. Eric Levakis, his daughter Alonnah, and her boyfriend Justin Woodward only made it out early Friday morning because neighbors noticed smoke and pounded on the front door, reports Eric Francis for Daybreak. “Smoke detectors, smoke detectors, smoke detectors!,” a Hartford fire officer said after the fire was out. “There were no working smoke detectors in the house so this came really close to being a fatal fire.” The smoke did take the lives of two of the family’s three dogs. Eric Levakis grew up in the house, as did his daughter; they’re now displaced. Eric’s story and photos at the link.
Lebanon police search for two suspects in anti-semitic graffiti incidents. The LPD yesterday released surveillance footage of two individuals they suspect spray-painted swastikas and other antisemitic graffiti at five locations around the city last week, with a request for the public’s help identifying them. Though the city manager tells the Valley News’s Alex Ebrahimi the incidents do not appear to be part of an organized effort, they follow hard on the heels of the swastika-laden vandalism of a popular coffee shop in Manchester, NH, and racist and antisemitic graffiti left on the Merrimack River Greenway Trail in Concord last week.
Behind the Upper Valley’s rise in tick-driven alpha-gal cases. In a story that’s equal parts alarming and fascinating, the VN’s Molly Hughes traces the regional rise in the “tick-borne allergy to red meat and nearly everything else that comes from a mammal.” She tells the story of Veronica Guyre, who collapsed one night hours after eating meatloaf—and how her husband, immunologist Paul Guyre, figured out what might be going on. (Here’s Lyme’s Jim Mason on a similar experience.) And she looks at how Dartmouth researchers discovered that it can also put type O blood patients at risk in blood transfusions.
SPONSORED: Electric washboard solos and juke-joint blues at Lebanon Opera House! On Friday, October 2 at 7:30 PM, see the Grammy-nominated North Mississippi Allstars featuring brothers Cody and Luther Dickinson. Relix calls them “one of the most dynamic and entertaining blues acts touring today.” The band’s must-see live shows overflow with soulful “hill country” blues, high-energy rock, and groovy psychedelic improvisations. Sponsored by Lebanon Opera House.
Catching up on that WRJ cemetery fire. In a press release Friday, the Hartford Police Department gave a smidgen of new detail on the body found Sept. 9 in a blazing car in the Hartford Point Cemetery, off Maple Street. It was a 62-year-old male Hartford resident who died of “thermal injury”—and that’s all they’ll say. In fact, community outreach officer Lt. William Furnari tells the VN’s Sophia Langlois, that may be all the information the department will wind up sharing, unless they can determine conclusively whether it was murder, suicide, or accident. “There’s no indication of a gunshot wound to the body, to the head,” Furnari tells Langlois.
State denies funding to Thetford to repair Tucker Hill Road. It’s one of two key “connector” roads that bridge the Ompompanoosuc and link Route 132 and Route 113 (the other is Academy Road), writes Li Shen in Sidenote. “For several years now residents, and bicyclists in particular, have complained about Tucker Hill's growing array of cracks and potholes,” she notes; the town’s patches never last long. Early this year, town manager Brian Story applied for state aid to resurface part of Tucker Hill. The state responded that it could only go part way—and then in September, reports Li, informed him that there would be no money at all. She dives into why this happened.
SPONSORED: Hamlet, but make it joyful. The New York Times called this radical reimagining of the Shakespearean play a “defiant affirmation of life.” Created by Peruvian company Teatro La Plaza and featuring eight actors with Down syndrome, the play centers community rather than focusing on the individual. The pioneering work comes to the Hop September 30 and October 1 following acclaimed runs at Lincoln Center, Theatre for a New Audience and the Edinburgh International Festival. Tickets and more information at the burgundy link or here. Sponsored by the Hop.
“Misleading” NH Supreme Court statement on questionable personnel maneuver was crafted by GOP lobbyist. That maneuver, which yielded a $50K payout to a highly placed court employee, is what cost former Chief Justice Gordon MacDonald his job—he resigned last week. Now, NHPR’s Todd Bookman reports on records just released by the Judicial Conduct Committee, which investigated the issue. They reveal that the court’s statement when news first broke of the maneuver was crafted by “a lobbyist with deep ties to the state’s Republican Party” with the knowledge of other justices—and that those justices had pressed to fire the employee. Bookman explores the emails, texts, and other communications detailed in the report.
Jury convicts Jason Eaton in shooting of three Palestinian students. As Seven Days’ Colin Flanders writes, yesterday’s verdict “capped a six-day trial during which jurors heard conflicting expert testimony about whether Eaton suffered from a severe mental illness that led to a break from reality” before he shot the students as they walked down the Burlington Street outside his apartment in November, 2023. It took jurors just two hours to reject the defense’s claim of insanity. Chittenden County State’s Attorney Sarah George says she has not yet decided on the length of sentence she intends to seek.
The Monday Jigsaw on Tuesday: Four horsepower. You’ll remember that last week, the Norwich Historical Society’s Cam Cross used a photo of a horse pulling a house down Central Street in Woodstock. This time around, he’s got a 1916 photo from Boston, of four horses moving a triple-decker out of the path of streetcar construction. How? They’re not pulling the house, he writes. Instead, they’re “walking in a circle and turning a machine, and the machine pulls the house.” More here.
The Tuesday mini crossword on Tuesday. From Dartmouth librarian Laura Braunstein.
Today's Wordbreak. With a word from Friday’s Daybreak.
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HEADS UP
At the Norman Williams Public Library in Woodstock: “Warren Leach | Beyond Blooms: Design with Color, Structure, and Seasonal Senescence.” The MA-based landscape designer runs nursery specializing in daylilies, irises, perennials, and woody plants. He’ll be highlighting woody and herbaceous plants “with good foliage color, architectural structure, multi-seasonal interest, and stunning shape that can be used in a diversity of ways to complement flowers in a mixed border.” Woodstock Garden Club social gathering at 12:30 pm (all welcome), presentation at 1 pm.
Cake4Kids at King Arthur. The CA-based nonprofit, which provides homemade birthday, graduation, and adoption cakes, cupcakes, or cookies for underserved and foster kids, will be set up at KAB in Norwich from 4 to 5:30 pm. “Meet local volunteers, learn how Cake4Kids brings joy to children through homemade birthday cakes and treats, and discover ways you can get involved,” King Arthur writes (scroll down at link).
At Hanover’s Howe Library, “Secrets of Romani Fortune Telling: A Conversation with Author Jezmina Von Thiele.” Von Thiele, a podcast host, fiction, nonfiction, and poetry writer, and a fortune teller, grew up in a Romani family. The book, written with Pauline Stevens, delves into the history of Romani divination; Von Thiele will also talk about what it was like growing up in a fortune-telling family. 6:30 pm in the Mayer Room as well as online.
The Tuesday Poem.
But the truth is, I am Thursday on a Monday. I
Am the walking calendar alive of mixed-up days and dim hours. I have
A week inside of me, a week or a year, time out of order. I have contracted
With the world to behave, to try, hard, to be Monday on a Monday. I
Look like I am happiness, don’t you think? On Monday, to you I have
The right laugh, and seem always to be even-keeled and at-eased.
— “Even-Keeled and At-Eased” by Alberto Ríos.
See you tomorrow.
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