Daybreak Wednesday, 5/27/26

Partly sunny, still warm. That Canadian cold front passes through today, but we’re not going to feel its effects until tomorrow. For now, we’ve got a mix of sun and clouds, winds from the northwest, and highs once again getting into the low 80s. Things definitely cool down tonight, with a low in the low 50s.

Reaching for the clouds. Strictly speaking, the tree and the cloud that Jay Davis noticed along River Road in Lyme aren’t actually yearning to touch one another…

Norwich’s Mary Layton pleads not guilty to financial exploitation charge. The selectboard member was in Windsor Superior Court yesterday, reports Alex Ebrahimi in the Valley News, where she pleaded not guilty to a felony charge of using money belonging to Hanover attorney Bill Clauson for her own purposes while he suffered from Alzheimer’s and dementia. Layton and Clauson had lived together for nearly a decade before his death last summer. Judge Dickson Corbett ordered Layton released on condition that she have no contact with Clauson’s daughter, who first raised the allegations, and froze Clauson’s Social Security deposits.

For Bridgewater carver, wood is in the blood. Enoch Hartwell can’t really be labeled. He’s a bathroom tiler, van converter, illustrator, and renowned wood carver—at home, music festivals, and as VT’s rep at the Chainsaw Carvers Rendezvous, the world’s biggest gathering, in Pennsylvania. But as Tom Ayres writes in the Standard, he’s also the son of Robert Hartwell, a Unity, NH wooden boat builder: “From chainsaw to chisel and airbrushing to pen-and-ink illustrations, the artistry that defines Enoch Hartwell’s life today is rooted in the lessons he learned from his father Rob about art, craftsmanship, creativity, teaching, encouraging aspiring creators, and giving back to the community,” Ayres writes. He profiles Enoch Hartwell and his work.

SPONSORED: A “wool-derful” day awaits at Billings Farm’s Family Sheep & Wool Celebration. On Saturday, May 30, from 10 am to 5 pm, guests of all ages can explore the journey from fleece to yarn through hands-on wool carding, spinning, weaving, and natural dyeing demonstrations. The day features sheep herding demonstrations with Border Collies, music by Billy Boucher’s Bluegrass Band, horse-drawn wagon rides, local food, and opportunities to meet sheep, rabbits, goats, and lambs. It’s a joyful day of fiber arts, farming, and family fun! Sponsored by Billings Farm & Museum.

Bunryūu - Rain That Splits a Dragon’s Body in Half. That is just one of the delightful and thought-provoking terms for rain contained in Miya Ando’s Water of the Sky: A Dictionary of 2,000 Japanese Rain Words. It is both a glossary and a work of art, writes Jared Jenisch in this week’s Enthusiasms, with 100 of Ando’s drawings that “evoke skies and landscapes across the full range of meteorological conditions, from hint of rain to violent tempest.” But her book also raises this question, Jared writes: “Why, after all, do we not have words for ‘Rain That Falls on Lilac Flowers in a Cold Region near the Sea,’ or ‘Sharing an Umbrella with Someone / Romantic Rain’?”

Go for a run, get “splashed” with color. The idea, Finding Our Stride executive director Greg DeFrancis tells Dave Celone in Celone’s Upper Valley VT/NH Musings Substack, is that once participants of all ages are done with the inaugural Community Color Splash & Dash on Sunday, they’ll be multi-colored (assuming they’re wearing light-colored duds) after passing stations where volunteers toss non-toxic colored powder on them. The untimed 300m, 3K, and 5K run/walk along the Dan Grossman Woods Trail at Thetford Academy has 138 registrants so far; it benefits FOS, which runs physical-activity after-school programs at schools all over the Upper Valley.

SPONSORED: Solaflect Energy — Real energy security, $1,400 battery discount. A home battery—especially paired with solar—keeps your family safe through power outages, ice storms, and disasters like Tropical Storm Irene. Right now, Solaflect is offering a $1,400 manufacturer’s discount on each 15 kWh FranklinWH whole-home battery installed. With GMP requesting a 7.5% rate increase for 2026 and gasoline above $4.50 a gallon, investing in energy independence has never made more sense. Call (802) 649-3700 or visit solaflect.com. Sponsored by Solaflect Energy.

Chelsea herb farm joins in on a Vermont cheese first. As Melissa Pasanen reports in Seven Days, the cheese to which Free Verse Farm contributed some of its crop is, like many VT cheeses, “made by a dedicated, hands-on artisan from the milk of one herd or flock.” Unlike the others, though, it’s the first to carry a “Milk With Dignity” label from the farmworker-advocacy group Migrant Justice. The cheese, from the food-hub collaborative Vermont Way Foods, comes from Middlebury cheesemaker Carlton Yoder, using milk from a Cornwall farm that signed Migrant Justice’s pledge to treat workers fairly. “Based on taste alone,” Pasanen writes, “the cheese should be an easy sell.”

DH will fund Good Neighbor Health Clinic medical director, associate. Over the last four years, executive director Elizabeth Franson tells the VN’s Clare Shanahan, the nonprofit WRJ clinic’s weekly patient load has tripled as “a lot of things economically have become harder for people.” And so, last week Dartmouth Health announced it will fund a full-time medical director and an associate medical director who can “oversee clinical operations, guide policy development and support volunteer clinicians and learners working within the clinic.” Good Neighbor had previously relied on volunteer medical directors. DH will conduct a national search for the director position.

SPONSORED: The Manton Foundation Annual Orozco Lecture at the Hood Museum. Join the Hood Museum tomorrow, May 28, from 5:00–6:00 pm as Dr. Jinyoung A. Jin of Stony Brook University discusses how Mexican murals inspired Korean art. Considering the work of José Clemente Orozco, Jin will explore parallels between Korean modern artist Lee Qoede’s oeuvre and the Mexican mural manifesto to investigate how their shared values reveal a deeper transnational current. Sponsored by the Hood Museum.

Campus carry, CHARLIE Act, and other bills that won’t get out of the NH legislature this year. As passed by the House, the controversial firearms legislation would have let students carry guns on campus; it got amended by the Senate to allow faculty, but not students, to go armed. Then, last week, the Senate rejected a House bid to meet and iron out their differences, thus deep-sixing the bill (more on the to-and-fro in Isabell Menna’s piece in The Dartmouth). Meanwhile, at the burgundy link, the NH Bulletin crew also look at the House’s rejection of the Senate’s bid to bring back the “divisive concepts” bill and other measures that have bitten the dust.

In VT, concrete progress on education reform bill. The state Senate yesterday voted 27-2 in favor of a measure that aims to have school district voters weigh in on voluntary district mergers at town meetings in 2028. It drops Gov. Phil Scott’s insistence on forced mergers, and instead creates regional service agencies for shared school services, and accelerates both the voluntary merger timeline and a “foundation formula” that would shift funding decisions away from local voters. The measure came out of closed-door meetings among Senate and House members with Scott’s team, report Seven Days’ Kevin McCallum and Alison Novak. A conference committee will now meet to work out differences between the two chambers’ approaches.

VT becomes first state to ban paraquat. Yesterday, Phil Scott signed into law a measure banning the use of the herbicide, which is mostly used to kill broadleaf weeds and grasses, after 2030. Before then, farmers will need permission to use it. As Kevin McCallum reports in Seven Days, in VT it’s used in limited amounts to kill weeds around young fruit trees. The highly toxic herbicide has been linked in studies to Parkinson’s disease, and over 70 countries have banned it. “It’s not an abstract risk. It affects farmers, farm workers and families in rural communities across the state and the country,” a lobbyist for the Michael J. Fox Foundation told VT legislators.

In a VT orchard, a ray of hope for the American elm. There are lots of reasons to try to bring the elm back, says Cornelia Wilson, a US Forest Service researcher helping lead a joint project with the Nature Conservancy in Benson, VT to raise elm saplings, inject them with Dutch elm disease spores, and then study—and spread the seedlings of—the trees that survive. Elms, Wilson tells the Globe’s Kate Selig, “do all the good stuff that trees do best.” Selig looks at elms’ history, efforts to keep surviving mature elms alive, and the experiment itself. Her story’s paywalled, but VTDigger’s Greta Solsaa also has a piece on the Benson experiment here.

Capturing the invisible energy of the universe—on film. Tom Liggett, a photography student in England, got to wondering what would happen to a film negative if it were exposed to cosmic radiation. He didn’t expect much, writes PetaPixel’s Matt Growcoot, when he sent a weather balloon carrying 5x4 negatives soaring 121,000 feet into the atmosphere from upstate NY. “All I wanted was a speck of dust or something,” says Liggett. The balloon burst, and as the film traveled earthward, “an accumulation of encounters” exposed it to black holes and solar radiation, creating a dazzling multi-colored abstract photo, “the actual molecular formula of space.”

Today's Wordbreak. With a word from yesterday’s Daybreak.

Daybreak doesn't get to exist without your support. Help it stick around by hitting the maroon button:

THERE'S SOME GREAT DAYBREAK SWAG! Like Daybreak tote bags, sweatshirts, head-warming beanies, t-shirts, long-sleeved tees, the Daybreak jigsaw, those perfect hand-fitting coffee/tea mugs, and as always, "We Make Our Own Fun" t-shirts and tote bags for proud Upper Valleyites. Check it all out at the link!

HEADS UP
Photographer Ian Clark at WRJ’s Bugbee Senior Center. Clark, the West Newbury photographer whose work appears regularly in Daybreak, will give a slideshow of his favorite images from 2025: not just the loon families he’s been following for many years and other wildlife from around New England, but also brown bears in Alaska and even a steam locomotive working on the White Pass & Yukon Route out of Skagway. 1 pm.

Dartmouth hosts Laura Field for “Furious Minds: The Making of the MAGA New Right”. That’s the title of a recent book by Field, a Brookings Fellow and scholar at American and George Washington universities, that looks closely and seriously at the work of the thinkers who’ve informed the MAGA movement. Though she writes that she is not a conservative, she studied political theory for years with professors who took their lead from conservative beacon Leo Strauss. Moderated by profs Russ Muirhead and Keidrick Roy, 5 pm in Rocky 003 and livestreamed.

The Etna Library hosts “The Art of Debate”. Oliver Benedict, a member of Hanover High's Debate Club, will talk about what it takes to debate a topic succesfully, how formal debate competitions work, and will lead a Q&A session. 6 pm.

Still North Books & Bar hosts Robin Dembroff, Susan Brison, and Jeff Sharlet. Dembroff, who teaches philosophy at Yale, joins Dartmouth philosophy prof Brison and writing prof/journalist Sharlet for a reading from their respective books: Dembroff’s Real Men on Top: How Patriarchy Shapes Our Reality; Brison’s Aftermath: Violence and the Remaking of a Self; and Sharlet’s The Undertow: Scenes from a Slow Civil War. 7 pm.

Dartmouth’s theater department kicks off its production of Green Day’s American Idiot. The show, which won two Tonys, “boldly takes the American musical where it's never gone before,” writes the Hop. “This high-octane show includes every song from Green Day's album, American Idiot, as well as several songs from its follow-up release, 21st Century Breakdown.” 7:30 pm this evening in the Moore Theater, same time tomorrow, Friday, and Saturday, as well as at 3 pm on Saturday and Sunday.

And for today...

Who knows, maybe it’s pure chance, but it sure feels like something more that saxophone great Sonny Rollins died on Monday (at age 95), the day before yesterday’s centenary of Miles Davis’s birth. They were, of course, giants among the jazz giants of the 20th century… and it’s hard not see the passing of an entire era in Rollins’s passing. Among other things, he was, until Monday, the last remaining of the musicians enshrined in the legendary 1958 Esquire mag photo, “A Great Day in Harlem.” Here’s music/cultural critic Ted Gioia on his Substack with more on Rollins, Davis, “A Great Day,” and what this moment might mean for jazz fans. And here are Davis and Rollins with “Doxy”.

See you tomorrow.

Looking for all of the hikes, Enthusiasms, daybreak photos, or music that Daybreak has published over the years? Go here!

And always, if you’re not a subscriber yet:

Want to catch up on Daybreak itself (or find that item you trashed by mistake the other day)? You can find everything on Daybreak’s homepage.

Written and published by Rob Gurwitt      Poetry editor: Michael Lipson    Associate Editors: Jonea Gurwitt, Sam Gurwitt

And if you think one or more of your friends would like Daybreak, too, please forward this newsletter and tell them to visit daybreak.news to sign up.

Thank you!