GOOD MORNING, UPPER VALLEY!
Mostly sunny (after the fog clears), still calm out there. We've got one more dry day with high pressure still in control. Highs today will be back in the mid or upper 60s, winds from the southeast. Tonight's when things start to change: clouds at first, as a warm front edges in, and moisture making its way into the region off the coast—though we won't see any of it until tomorrow. Lows tonight in the upper 40s.It's the season! Or, as Brooke Beaird puts it, it's "pumpkinpalooza" in Woodstock. Though, of course, in a neat and orderly way.Co-op will close Lyme Road market Oct. 18. In an announcement yesterday, Co-op marketing director Dawn Archambeault said execs had made the "difficult" decision as the Lyme Road market's staff shrinks: "setting a firm closing date can give [that team] the closure they need so they can move forward with their careers," she wrote, explaining, "We have been unable to make our Co-op Market on Lyme Road a viable retail business." The Co-op had hoped to turn the spot into a commissary, but Hanover's zoning board has twice turned it down. The Co-op will "continue to assess the future use of the space," Archambeault added.WRJ, Lebanon aim to boost EV chargers. Seven level-two electric vehicle charging stations (the kind that take a few hours to charge a car) are already planned for the S. Main Street parking lot in downtown WRJ, reports Clare Shanahan in the Valley News, while the town is also hoping to add three fast chargers somewhere downtown. “We want to have a place where folks can come down and walk to our amenities while they’re charging within an hour," says the town's sustainability coordinator. Meanwhile, Leb is buying a solar-powered charger made by Solaflect for the lot behind City Hall. More at the link.SPONSORED: "There's No Way That Just Happened!" What happens when you tear your ACL one year, and just when you're in the clear, you tear your other one the next year? Ask Hanover High’s Charlie Chambers, who despite the numerous setbacks, is appreciative of what the experience brought him and excited for what's next! Read his story via the link above. Sponsored by Cioffredi & Associates Physical Therapy. Until the very end, longtime Thetford/Stevens track & field coach kept coaching. Scott Chapman—who built Thetford Academy's program before moving over to Claremont's Stevens High a few years ago—loved the sport. “He would stop to watch a track and field meet even when he had no dog in the fight,” his son Cole tells Joseph Deffner in the Valley News. Even in the ICU as he was dying from cancer he kept tabs on Stevens athletes. So when Thetford's coaches put together the Scott Chapman Cowboy Classic to honor him this summer, past team members and their parents turned out in force.Translating chipmunk. "This is the time of year when Eastern Chipmunks are especially vocal," writes Mary Holland on her Naturally Curious blog. Curious about what it all meant, a group of NatGeo researchers attached tiny microphones to chipmunks, then watched their behavior. They found three types of warnings, Holland writes: "chipping" for earth-bound predators or when a chipmunk's defending territory; a "chip-trill" when the chipmunk's on the move to defend territory; and "clucking", reserved for airborne predators.SPONSORED: Enjoy some fall family fun at PepperFest 2024. Honey Field Farm is hosting their annual celebration of all-things-peppers—from sweet bell peppers to Carolina reapers, they've got them all! Stop by the farm in Norwich this weekend for pick-your-own peppers, pepper eating contests, hot sauce sampling, games, food trucks and more! PepperFest 2024 runs Sept. 28th-29th and Oct. 2nd-6th. Tickets are available both online and in-person and are only $5 per vehicle. Sponsored by Honey Field Farm.Hunting season's here—time to pay attention to safety out in the woods. Deer and turkey archery seasons began Sept. 15 in NH and are coming Oct. 1 and Oct. 5 in VT, and a variety of other seasons are either under way or coming soon. In the Keene Sentinel, Abigail Ham rounds up the cautions: hunting accidents are usually due to "poor judgment by the hunter or careless handling of a firearm"—and offers hunter brush-up tips from N.H. Fish and Game educator Eric Geib ("be 100 percent sure of the target and what’s beyond it"). For walkers and hikers: blaze orange for yourself and your pets.
An audit of NH's school voucher program is coming. But it'll be missing "most documents." Last month, reports Susan Geier for the NH News Collaborative, a legislative committee approved next year's audit of the state's Education Freedom Accounts. But after months of tussles between legislators and state officials over over access to basic EFA data, it will go ahead with severe limits. GOP legislators and administrators argued that Democrats were seeking information "to kill education choice," Geier writes; Dems argued state officials are "trying to obscure how the program is being run."Three years after NH got in the way of Concord's effort to buy land for Northern Rail Trail, the dream of a Lebanon-to-Salem bike route is still on hold. And there's a lot of frustration out there, reports Sruthi Gopalakrishnan in the Monitor (possible paywall). The hitch came when the state exercised a right of first refusal on a stretch of railroad right-of-way that Concord wants to use to knit the Leb-Boscawen trail together with a nearly finished trail to the south. Now, the price has gone up. “The delay to me is unfathomable,” says one advocate. “You have to wonder what the state’s intentions are here.”In VT, number of mosquitoes testing positive for EEE drops. In fact, reports Erin Petenko in VTDigger, "the number of pools testing positive has dropped from 26 to fewer than 10 to none in the most recent mosquito collection, which occurred from Sept. 8 to 14." The latest tests also showed no positive results for West Nile. Even so, state epidemiologist Patsy Kelso says the health department will keep its guidance for high-risk communities—clustered in the northwest part of the state—in place until the first hard frost there, "as there are likely still mosquitoes that are carrying the EEE virus.”“It shouldn’t be this hard. And I still don’t have anything that I can pay a bill with.” Lyndon, VT municipal administrator Justin Smith has spent the better part of a year trying to get reimbursement money from FEMA for last year's floods—and he's got plenty of company. According to FEMA records, reports VT Public's Peter Hirschfeld, nearly some 60 percent of public assistance requests submitted by towns in the state hadn't been approved as of Sept. 6. The result? "The same federal bureaucracy that hampered flood recovery for individuals is plunging small, rural towns into crippling debt."Yellow Barn project in Hardwick aims to reshape local food economy. It's impossible to miss the huge, well, yellow barn on the outskirts of town that for three decades was home to the Greensboro Garage. Now, reports K. Fiegenbaum in VTDigger, its next version is starting up: Cabot Creamery held a grand opening for a new retail store on Sept. 14, and a food "accelerator" space is due to open soon. Jasper Hill will use part of it to consolidate its storage and fulfillment facilities; the Center for an Agricultural Economy will create a "Food Hub" for distributing locally produced food.Performing under a bust of a moose, trying to skirt duck-hunting season deep in the woods... "Not the sort of consideration you have to take into account when scheduling Carnegie Hall,” David Feurzeig tells the WSJ's Betsy McKay (gift link). You already know about the UVM prof and former world-circling pianist's goal of playing a concert in all 252 of VT's towns. But McKay gets deeper into his quest than usual—how he scouts venues and connects with locals; the groupies who follow him from town to town; the songs he plays ("Steamboat Rag" in Fairlee, “Beets and Turnips” in the home of the state vegetable). And he's hoping for a concert at the top of a chairlift. Thanks, LM!Blades the length of a football field. Three Statues of Liberty tall—above the water. It's a visit to Vineyard Wind. WGBH reporter Craig LeMoult was among a group of public media journalists chartered by the New England News Collaborative to go take a look, with experts on board, at the giant wind project 15 miles off Martha's Vineyard and Nantucket. He tells GBH's Judie Yuill about the trip—and the mixed responses from environmental leaders on board, ranging from "at last!" to concern about the impact of construction on Atlantic right whales. The two talk over where things are headed.Play (with) it again, Sam. The Strong National Museum of Play, in Rochester, NY, is home to the Toy Hall of Fame. You know: Barbie, Legos, and all the other toys you loved (or hated) as a child. It’s time to add to the Hall, and 2024 voting runs through Wednesday. So you could go for, say, My Little Pony (“encourages children in traditional forms of doll play—fantasy, storytelling, hair grooming”) or Transformers (they "do what kids do anyway—change the toy to suit the needs of play") or the trampoline, balloons, the stick horse, Hess toy trucks, Choose Your Own Adventure books... Oh, or Pokémon. Vote at the link.Daybreak doesn't get to exist without your support. Help it stick around by hitting the maroon button:
We may be the middle of nowhere to everyone else in VT and NH, but
we
know what's good! Strong Rabbit's Morgan Brophy has come up with the perfect design for "We Make Our Own Fun" t-shirts and tote bags for proud Upper Valleyites. Plus you'll find the Daybreak jigsaw puzzle, as well as sweatshirts, tees, a fleece hoodie, and, as always, the fits-every-hand-perfectly Daybreak mug. Check it all out at the link!
Dartmouth's Rockefeller Center hosts the Howard University civil rights prof and former president of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund for a talk exploring those key issues in the context of this year's presidential election. 5 pm in Filene Auditorium
.
Berry's latest, Trust Her, focuses on a pair of Northern Irish sisters resettled in Dublin whose past tangles with the IRA catch up to them. Taylor's Agony Hill, set in these parts in the 1960s, brings the turmoil of that era to bear on a small New England town and the death of one of its residents. She and Berry will be talking books and craft. 6 pm at the Norman Williams Public Library.
Thompson's debut novel,
Anyone's Ghost
, about a long love-and-yearning story that begins on a New Hampshire summer afternoon, has been stacking up accolades here and abroad.
“I wanted the reader’s attention to be on the granularity of falling for someone,” Thompson told an interviewer earlier this year. “To me, the book is about intimations and those tiny moments, not the artificial drama of whether Theron and Jake get together or not.” 7 pm.
"Olsen’s voice has always been a strangely stirring instrument, like an imaginary folk trio of Roy Orbison, Karen Dalton and Lucinda Williams singing in tight harmony," the
NYT
wrote a couple of years back. And as Olsen herself once told a magazine writer, "I don't like small talk"—either in interviews or in her deeply personal, no-holds-barred songs. She's at LOH tonight at 7:30, with lo-fi indie rocker Greg Mendez opening.
And the Tuesday poem...
The Problem of Writing Poems
in the Shape of Deciduous Trees
a comm n
pr ble whe writin
p ems in the shape of decid o s
trees is t at once t ere ar ives the fir t
sti rings of he new aut mn breeze, he
oems will begi to shake hemselves
ge tly ntil their letters loos n
like leaves, an
they
start d
to
float
down
then
turntomushuponthegroun
— by the British poet Brian Bilston,
. (
That lone "d", by the way, is supposed to be slightly off-kilter, as though falling—just couldn't get Mailchimp's text editor to cooperate.
)
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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