GOOD MORNING, UPPER VALLEY!
Fog, sun, beautiful weather, yadda yadda. High pressure’s right overhead today, and once the fog clears we’ve got full-on sun pretty much all day, with temps getting into the mid 70s. Not quite as cool overnight as last night, with lows around 40.
Day is done. Sunset over Mascoma Lake, with the sky pulling out pretty much every shade of red in its palette. From Jeff Hinman.
“Maybe less is more… more or less.” What do you do when you’re living the digital life in the middle of Lost Woods? Wally ponders the complications—like trying to find an electrical outlet—in this week’s strip from DB Johnson.
As the trees start turning color… there are all kinds of colors coming in from the fields. So in this week’s set of recipes for readers of the Edgewater Farm blog, Plainfield’s Mitchell Davis—cookbook author and one of the "100 Greatest Home Cooks of All Time” (per Epicurious)—takes on two of-the-moment recipes: one makes use of the Chinese or Japanese eggplants that are arriving from the fields for a stir-fry; the other is a traditional French Basque sauté of peppers (“a delicious accompaniment to scrambled eggs, broiled fish, or even cottage cheese,” Mitchell writes). Have at it!
Thirteen years after crash that partially paralyzed him, former standout Croydon athlete reflects. Brayden McKinney, now 29, “lived life at figurative full throttle until literally hitting a wall,” sportswriter Tris Wykes writes on his newly revived Octopus Athletics blog. A wild, fearless kid who eventually channeled his energy into the Newport (NH) High football team, McKinney was driving home one morning after a night of drinking when he fell asleep at the wheel. His pickup hit a berm and landed on top of him. McKinney hadn’t been wearing a seat belt. In a full-on profile, Wykes recounts his childhood, the accident, and the tough, lonely years since.
Claremont school may have to close, students shifted to city’s two other elementary schools. Fueled by districtwide financial challenges, Bluff Elementary “can no longer meet its legal obligation to provide special education services,” reports Patrick O’Grady in the Valley News: A hiring and spending freeze plus resignations and “employment uncertainty” at the school have meant that it can’t meet special ed requirements in federal law. “The pressure being placed on teachers and staff right now is untenable and the demands are demoralizing and not in the best interest of Claremont’s children,” says the head of the local teachers union, a Bluff teacher.
SPONSORED: The trolls are waiting for you! Last year's kindergarten class at the Ray School in Hanover created a beloved exhibit that's captured the hearts of visiting families. These imaginative woodland creatures are tucked onto the trails at VINS Nature Center, ready to spark wonder in explorers of all ages. The student-built display runs through this month, so there's still time to discover these creative treasures before they're gone. Come see what happens when young naturalists bring their vision to life! And check them out in the video at the link. Sponsored by VINS.
Coming soon, events to draw you to the stage and to the gallery. In Artful, Susan Apel takes a look at just a few of the many things ahead to tempt the culturally curious. Northern Stage launches its season in a couple of weeks with Come From Away, the highly popular musical about Gander, Newfoundland and its open-hearted welcome for all the people on planes diverted there on 9/11. Around the corner at Shaker Bridge, Jonathan Spector’s prescient—and often funny—play about a lefty private school board dealing with a mumps outbreak opens not long after, with Gordon Clapp in the lead. There’s Oleanna at Parish Players, a Hood block party, and more.
Leb’s Marsh Brothers Deli lands on Yelp’s Top 100 Sandwich Shops list. In the country, that is. The Marshes themselves haven’t made a big deal of it, but there they are: #63 in the hearts of Yelp reviewers, sharing real estate with shops from much bigger places (#62 is in Chicago)—along with V’s Sandwich in Tilton at #100, and Rutland’s Sandwich Shoppe at #22. The overwhelming majority of Marsh Brothers reviews are five stars, with some lovingly described sandwich experiences. And some short ones: “Best service & BEST sandwiches period breakfast or lunch, I don't need an excuse to stop in.” (Thanks, HHC!)
SPONSORED: Don’t miss “Speaking of Kinship” at the Hood Museum! This year, the museum’s Dr. Allen W. Root Contemporary Art Lectureship features a panel discussion with three of the artists whose work is on view in the striking new exhibition Visual Kinship: Nancy Rivera, Sim Chi Yin, and Kali Spitzer. Moderated by Associate Curator of Photography Alisa Swindell, the conversation will address photography’s role in thinking about and understanding kinship and its relation to their practice of art. A reception will follow in Russo Atrium. Join us this Friday, Sept. 12, 5:00–6:30 pm. Sponsored by the Hood Museum.
Mystery solved. Looking out her window the other day, a Thetford resident who lives along the tracks noticed a series of pint-sized vehicles zipping along them. She put her video up on the Upper Valley VT/NH Facebook group (sorry, you’ll have to be a member of the group to see it, but there are nearly 32,000 of you): “It looked like fun. Who and what are they?” she asked. Pretty soon came the answer: “Those are old (retired) RR inspection cars. Some people…buy them, fix them up and travel the rails. Usually once every year they do this trip from WRJ to Newport Vermont, going up one day and coming back the next day.” Maybe we’ll see them next year?
Hartford man dies after accident at recycling/waste center. Paul Smollin, 76, was “standing behind his truck and lowering the tailgate to check in” on Saturday, the town writes in a press release, when “another truck in line accelerated, pinning Mr. Smollin between the two vehicles.” Smollin was taken to DHMC with a lower leg injury, but “while receiving care, he went into cardiac arrest and was pronounced deceased at DHMC.” The Hartford PD is investigating, and no charges have been filed pending the results, the release says.
Now the ranking Democrat in Concord, Leb’s Karen Liot Hill is also “a big target for Republicans.” So says NHPR political reporter Josh Rogers, who notes that the former Lebanon city council member, now the lone Democrat on the Exec Council, has a habit of wading into statewide policy debates: “This style of advocacy by a councilor isn’t typical,” he writes. “The Executive Council’s purview is more administrative: approving state contracts and appointments to key government jobs.” GOP leaders are taking issue with her uses for campaign funds and use of her state email to solicit plaintiffs for a legal challenge. Liot Hill brushes the attacks off as partisan.
“A 70-year-old homesteader bakes traditional bread by candlelight in a clay oven she built by hand.” Who knows how the pair of filmmakers behind the cottagecore YouTube site Cottage & Company discovered Suzanne Lupien and her modern-amenities-free Harken Farm in Vershire, but recently they came out with the start of a series about her life there. Now they’re up with a second, focused on her bread baking, which begins by candlelight at 4 am. The visuals capture a lot. But so, years ago, did Lexi Krupp in a profile for a Dartmouth writing class. “She’s idealistic and resentful, in love with people and deeply dissatisfied with the world they’ve made,” Krupp wrote. “She wants more beauty and gentleness. She wants people to mow their own lawns.”
Disco, pulsing, zombie snail projections. Not your usual Rumble Strip episode: radio producer Erica Heilman sits down to talk with Montpelier writer and naturalist Bryan Pfeiffer, a friend, about his discovery of snails taken over by the developing stage of a flatworm that turned the snail’s eyestalks into multi-colored appendages. “Most people are freaked out by these snails,” he says. She responds, “I have to say, I’m a little freaked out by these snails.” The flatworm’s entire lifecycle is probably not something you want to contemplate over breakfast, yet as Erica says, “Bryan’s one of those rare grownups who can still sit at the kids’ table.”
“The signs were all there from the start, almost like that field was talking to me.” Ben McGhee, a seasoned artifact hunter in northeast Missouri, has a sixth sense for buried treasures. As a child, he tells Chris Bennett of Farm Journal’s AgWeb, “we were surrounded by farms, and the old-timers … took the time to teach me how to look, where to look, and why.” This year, the find of a lifetime: a cache of 51 Native American chert blades, which he estimates were made 2,000 years ago. “When you walk farmland or a creek, you look not only with your eyes,” he says, “but with a feeling.”
Today's Wordbreak. With a word from yesterday’s Daybreak.
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The Tuesday poem.
Who would be a turtle who could help it?
A barely mobile hard roll, a four-oared helmet,
she can ill afford the chances she must take
in rowing toward the grasses that she eats.
Her track is graceless, like dragging
a packing-case places, and almost any slope
defeats her modest hopes. Even being practical,
she's often stuck up to the axle on her way
to something edible….
Her only levity is patience,
the sport of truly chastened things.
— From “Turtle”, by Kay Ryan. And here’s the NYT’s AO Scott (gift link) with a visually engaging piece on how Ryan creates “a vivid word-portrait of comic dignity” with this poem. Plus some diversions to help you memorize it.
See you tomorrow.
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