GOOD MORNING, UPPER VALLEY!
Cloudy, even warmer. Things will be quiet today ahead of the main event late tonight and tomorrow. Temps will climb from the mid-20s this morning into the upper 30s (or even higher if you're farther south) this afternoon, and in many spots will stay above freezing through the night. Which is why what happens with the winter storm approaching from the west will be, um, interesting. At least overnight, it'll be mostly snow. We'll deal with tomorrow tomorrow.A bird's paradise. On Sunday, Lauran Corson noticed hundreds of birds flocking to the fruit trees along Pleasant and Central streets in Woodstock: robins, starlings, and above all, cedar waxwings—all flitting in tandem from tree to tree. They ignored her and her camera... and, "after feasting for a few hours on the remaining shriveled berries," she writes, "they were all gone."Quechee renters told to vacate by new Boston-based landlord. Residents of at least 18 units in two Quechee apartment buildings who do not have leases received notice on Friday that they have to leave by the end of April, reports Ethan Weinstein in VTDigger. The buildings—along with two others—were bought in November by a subsidiary of Boston-based investment group MG2. “We’re all just beside ourselves. We weren’t expecting it,” says one renter. “And we all have kids." Tenants describe "maintenance issues" under both the old and new landlords, including mold and broken heating.W. Windsor's revival of Ascutney's ski resort makes the NYT. Backcountry ski guru and VT Conversation host David Goodman has a long piece in the paper's travel section tracing W. Windsor's bid to revive its fortunes by buying the shuttered Ascutney ski resort in 2015 and turning its resurrection into a community effort. Thanks to the concerted efforts of Ascutney Outdoors, the mountain and the town "are magnets for families and outdoor enthusiasts," he writes. Plus a shout-out to Brownsville Butcher & Pantry's role.Canaan officialdom in transition. To begin with, reports Darren Marcy in the Valley News, longtime town administrator Mike Samson plans to step down by the end of the year. Two selectboard members have said they won't be running for re-election, including board chair Scott Borthwick, whose seat is up next year. And the fire chief, Bill Bellion, plans to retire after Town Meeting. SPONSORED: Wow! It's cold outside! For some of our neighbors it’s cold inside as well, because they have trouble paying their heating bills. But this month, LISTEN has an anonymous match of $25,000 for our Heating Helper Program! Please celebrate the spirit of Valentine’s Day by loving your neighbors and helping them keep their houses warm. You can donate to the Heating Helpers Program at the maroon link. Sponsored by LISTEN. A bit more on that Dresden transgender-privacy policy. Last week, VTDigger reported a challenge by some Hanover parents to a policy in SAU 70 schools barring staff from talking to parents or family members about a student's gender identity without permission. SAU 70 Supt. Jay Badams tells the Norwich Observer's Chris Katucki that he believes the policy aligns with VT school guidance, and that "we have received calls from several Norwich parents who are urging us to maintain the policy as it is.” Plenty of Hanover parents support it as well, arguing that schools need to be safe spaces.Woodsville mystery. On Monday, the NH Attorney General's office put out a short and cryptic press release saying that a body had been found in a Haverhill business, and that the death was suspicious. Yesterday, reports the Valley News, the body was identified as that of a 19-year-old Vermonter, Victor Maldonado, found at Robbins Property Maintenance near the Woodsville Walmart. The owner, Steve Robbins, tells the paper he did not know Maldonado or how he came to be on his property. "I’m waiting for answers as much as you are,” he says.Best hot chocolate in Hanover? It was a tough reporting job, but The Dartmouth's Hannah Shariff was up to it, surveying seven spots around town and on campus. Umpleby's, she writes, is too "nutty." The Nest, which has some of the best coffee cake in town, doesn't really cut it when it comes to hot chocolate—too much milk, which Shariff writes is a common problem in town, including at My Brigadeiro. Foco and Starbucks aren't bad, she says. But the best? Dirt Cowboy's is "a not-too-sweet, not-too-mild cup of deliciousness."Meet Jason Chin, whose illustrations just won the Caldecott. Chin grew up in Lyme, went to Hanover High, and now lives in S. Burlington. He says he’s “overjoyed and humbled” by an honor that felt “quite surreal” when he got the news last week. He spoke to VPR’s Liam Elder-Connors about the “once-in-a-lifetime opportunity” to illustrate Andrea Wang’s emotionally rich children’s book Watercress, how the story resonated, and why it mattered to incorporate Chinese painting techniques. “If there are children who are immigrants…and they read this book,” he says, “I hope it makes them feel seen.”The scene of this story is any American college town... But the author's note was a little misleading. It was Hanover, and the college was Dartmouth, and Bravig Imbs' 1928 novel, The Professor's Wife, was a thinly veiled, satirical look at the head of the English Department and his wife, for whom Imbs had worked as a butler, and their visitors (both locals and literary celebs). So thinly veiled that the book was "unofficially banned at the two bookstores in town," writes Isaac Lorton in Junction mag. The book's just been reissued by London-based Eglantyne Books, as Eric's Story. A refuge when the world seems chaotic. That is how writer's writer Natalie Goldberg describes haiku in her new book, Three Simple Lines: A Writer’s Pilgrimage into the Heart and Homeland of Haiku—and it's a description that could apply to Goldberg's book itself, Jared Jenisch writes in this week's Enthusiasms. The book traces Goldberg's pilgrimages to honor the great haiku masters, blending memoir, travel writing, and a literary exploration of haiku and its practitioners—itself evoking their sense of "subtle, always-present impermanence...and exquisite perception of longing, loneliness, and surrender.”The worst blood shortage the NH Red Cross has seen in a decade. Last month, Catholic Medical Center got an email from the organization that its allotment had to be cut by two-thirds. "It had us all drop our jaws to the floor,” the hospital's associate chief medical officer tells the Monitor's Teddy Rosenbluth. "This blood shortage actually has the chance of having a bigger impact on our operations than COVID." The shortage, Rosenbluth writes, is the result of two years of problems: donors opting to avoid blood drives, worksites that often hold blood drives going remote, staffing shortages... A bigger palette of housing choices on the docket in NH, too. Current zoning laws and development requirements, writes David Brooks on his Granite Geek blog, make it so that no NH developer "can afford to build anything other than big apartment buildings or big houses spaced far apart." But the demand for other options—duplexes and triplexes, bungalows, carriage houses—is rising. And, Brooks argues, vital not just to providing more affordable options but to stemming sprawl. But "this is one of those situations where local control often means local opposition to change," he adds.Seal? Astronaut? One or the other, that's what NHPR's Rick Ganley felt like after getting into a winter wetsuit with fleece lining and thick mittens to go surfing off Hampton beach recently. It was for a "Radio Field Trip," and it was Ganley's first time out on a board. Which showed. "For about twenty minutes I fell off just before I could stand up. On the last attempt I managed to just get up to my feet, and then I face-planted into the water," he reports. But hey, he says he's going to try again! What some reporters will do for a story. ER waits climb for VT kids and adolescents in mental health crises as Brattleboro Retreat faces staffing shortage. The Retreat is the only psychiatric facility in the state that works with children and adolescents, and a Covid outbreak there has sidelined staffers, forcing some people to wait in emergency rooms around the state for as long as 40 days, reports VTDigger's Liora Engel-Smith. The state has helped the Retreat hire temporary staff, but last week put out a request for proposals for 10 psychiatric beds elsewhere. The current arrangement, a state official says, "isn't working.""Perhaps the only woodturner at these Olympic Winter Games. Or any Olympic Games." Sean Doherty is a Vermonter on the US biathlon team. He lives in Albany, VT, with his girlfriend, Tara Geraghty-Moats—the Upper Valley's own should-have-been-an-Olympian who got tired of waiting for international Nordic Combined officials to let women compete in the Olympics and switched to biathlon. Doherty grew up in Conway, NH, got hooked on biathlon when he was 12...and got into woodturning after a maple tree came down on his family's property, Peggy Shin writes on the Team USA site.“The best Scrabble players are like wizards, and I wanted to become a member of their order.” That was the moment Oliver Roeder, who grew up hating the game, finally realized he was hooked on Scrabble. In Lit Hub’s excerpt of his new book, Seven Games, enter the world—and minds—of Scrabble’s elite players and their supernatural talent for turning alphagrams (like AEIKRSTW) into playable words (like WATERSKI). And see why a great player may not be a vocabulary nerd but, rather, a computer programmer “who can easily retain coded information and quickly turn it into ordered meaning.”Yeah, okay, they can pull heavy weights. But wheelie-popping? Here, farmers compete in tractor pulls. But over in India, they have other ways of showing off what their machinery can do. Maroon link takes you to a Twitter thread with some of the most outrageous, but it starts with some profanity. If you'd prefer to avoid that, here's a TikTok compilation with some crazy Indian tractor swag, modification-strutting, and big-wheeled acrobatics.
Daybreak doesn't get to exist without your support. Help it keep going by hitting the maroon button:
At 5 pm today, this year's resident woodworking artist at the Hop, Michael Hurwitz, looks back on four decades of furniture-making and talks over the sources of creativity. You'll find work by Hurwitz, who's based in Philadelphia, in the Smithsonian, at Boston's Museum of Fine Arts, at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and elsewhere. In-person in Alumni Hall, no charge but a ticket's required (which you may be able to get at the door).
Also at 5, Dartmouth's Wright Center (part of the Neukom Institute) hosts a Zoom talk by Andie Tucher, a historian and journalist at the Columbia Journalism School: "Misinformed: 300 Years of Fake News in America." As the promo blurb says, democracy's information system "has been invaded and exploited over the years by hoaxers, humbuggers, propagandists, puffers, partisans, blusterers, scandal-mongers, and fraudsters with motives of their own. The relationship between journalism and truth has always been more fragile than many of us realize."
And at 5:30 this afternoon, the Hop's ongoing "Big Move" workshop continues with "Perception, Meaning, and Movement" with NYC-based dance artist and choreographer Faye Driscoll and Dartmouth brain sciences prof Viola Stoermer, whose work focuses on understanding how human perception, attention, and memory work. Online via Zoom but tix are going fast.
At 6 pm, the North Branch Nature Center hosts an online presentation by Isabelle Groc, a Vancouver, BC-based nature photographer and filmmaker, "Life of a Conservation Photographer: Stories from the Field." She'll highlight her work with scientists and conservationists in remote spots around the world.
Also at 7, it's the first Wednesday of the month, which of course means VT Humanities has a full slate of online First Wednesdays lectures. Starting with UVM political science prof Bob Pepperman Taylor, hosted by the Norwich Public Library, talking about the ways in which John Dewey's political and educational ideas still resonate in these tumultuous times. Also: jazz archivist and poet (and former VPR jazz host) Reuben Jackson on Marvin Gaye's "What's Going On" 50 years on; Middlebury prof Ellery Foutch on the meanings of hair in American culture, both past and present; poet Shanta Lee Gander on poets' creative lineage, starting with Lucy Terry Prince (the country's first known African-American poet); former UVM prof Huck Gutman on reading Walt Whitman; and lots more.
At 7:30 this evening, DHMC hosts a live webinar, "When Worry Shows Up: How Parents and Caregivers Can Help Children During Uncertain Times." Led by child-anxiety specialist Lynn Lyons, it will explore how anxiety works in young children, how to address those anxieties, how to help kids with both small and big transitions, and more. There'll be a Q&A at the end.
Speaking of acrobatics in unusual places...
we were, remember? up above?
... watching Moscow Ballet dancers Elena Petrichenko and Sergey Chumakov makes you wonder why ballet companies don't showcase more like them. Russia has a long history of exploring the creative limits of what ballet artists and circus artists can do—but not often in the same performers.
at the Baltic Ballet Festival in Riga, Latvia.
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.
Daybreak Where You Are: The Album. Photos of daybreak around the Upper Valley, Vermont, New Hampshire, and the US, sent in by readers.
Want to catch up on Daybreak music?
Written and published by Rob Gurwitt Writer/editor: Tom Haushalter Poetry editor: Michael Lipson About Rob About Tom About Michael
And if you think one or more of your friends would like Daybreak, too, please forward this newsletter and tell them to hit the blue "Subscribe" button below. And thanks! And hey, if you're that friend? So nice to see you! You can subscribe at:
Thank you!