GOOD MORNING, UPPER VALLEY!
We need to talk about today. We may start out foggy, but it's going to get both hot and quite humid. The Weather Service says, "This means biophysical cooling mechanisms will be less effective, increasing risk for heat illness..." This is especially true to our west, but the Connecticut River Valley "will approach thresholds" for a heat advisory, depending on what happens with our cloud cover. Whatever: Take it easy outside today, okay? The high will be in the low 90s, heat index 94-96, depending where you are. Low tonight around 70.To get a sense of what things will look like in your neck of the woods...
Here are the specific heat forecasts for VT (and the 'dacks);
And for NH (and ME).
That would be the bobcat that opted for a well-used trail in West Windsor, caught on Robin Malkasian's trail cam.
Good Neighbor to open health clinic near downtown Leb.
With the help of a $15,000 donation from Dartmouth Health, the WRJ-based community clinic, which serves over 1,000 people a year, is setting up shop at 103 Hanover Street, the small retail complex at the corner with Route 120. "Over the next several weeks," clinic spokesman Christopher Dugan emails, "we will be renovating our new space and working with area agencies to ensure a smooth opening process." No opening date has been set yet.
(No link.)
On Monday afternoon, its owner was on a lift removing paint with a heat gun, reports WCAX's Adam Sullivan, when the old grade school caught fire. "We hopped in the truck and hightailed it over here," Chad Roy, who was working down the street, tells Sullivan. "And when we got here, Lisa [Stepancic] was up in the lift trying to put the fire out up at the steeple" to no avail. Fire crews were still at the scene yesterday morning,
"Everybody is really upset,” Newbury lister Janis Moore tells him.
It will share the grant with Burlington's Vermont Center for Emerging Technologies, reports
Seven Days'
Anne Wallace Allen. The money, she writes, "is part of a nearly $58 million that was allocated to Vermont this month by the U.S. Department of the Treasury in a bid to make access to startup capital more democratic, and to help small businesses create jobs." The Hartland organization was founded in 2017 by Matt Dunne to build "digital economies" in rural America.
William Smith Auction's next auction features a wonderful collection of country Americana, including early furniture, redware, samplers, and folk art. It will be set up for preview in the historic ca. 1810 French House at Wm. Smith Auctioneers & Appraisers, in Plainfield NH. Please take advantage of this wonderful opportunity and visit us during the preview Wednesday. Aug. 4th & Thursday, Aug. 5th, from 10-5. The auction begins Friday. Aug. 6th at 10 am. Photos and details at the link.
Sponsored by Wm. Smith Auctions.
Women-owned businesses in WRJ: "We've been able to establish this genuine sense of care for the community." That's Kim Souza, the pioneering owner of Revolution, talking to Annie and Ollie Hanna and AJ Fredland. The Hanna sisters, from Lebanon, and AJ, from Hartford, took CATV's news and media jamCAMP last week and produced this short film, interviewing Souza, Flourish's Kirsten Connor, JUEL's Elena Taylor, and Gear Again's Bridget Cushman. There's a strong sense of collaboration, the women say, but also challenges. "People don't ask me for advice," Cushman tells them. "They'll find a dad helping a kid put on ice skates and ask that person..."A novel about poverty that's really about love. "I’d like to think this sharply observed and deftly constructed novel about a father and son who descend into homelessness could become less timely, not more so. But here we are," writes Courtney Cook in this week's Enthusiasms. Jakob Guanzon's Abundance came out last year and was longlisted then for a National Book Award. Its portrait of a Midwestern father desperately searching for options as they dwindle is even more worth reading now, Courtney writes: "detached but deeply tender; detailed, but not prurient; it neither shouts and screams, nor does it look away."Thinking about buying an EV? Hartford's energy commission and VT Law and Graduate School (remember? they changed their name...) have teamed up on a new Buyer's Guide to Driving Electric in Vermont's Upper Valley. Though there's plenty in there that would be helpful to New Hampshire's Upper Valley, too. It covers acronyms (yeah, I didn't know what an HFCV is, either); a shopping checklist; a rundown of federal and VT incentives; types of EVs; battery, charging, and mileage basics; maintenance and repairs; a lot on the financial bottom line; and more. Putting the library in "seed library." To be precise, the town library in Peterborough, NH, which is now hosting a community seed library just across from the front desk, reports Isabel Dreher in the Monadnock Ledger-Transcript. The effort is the doing of Colette Lucas, a master gardener who found that supply-chain issues were hampering her ability to get seeds. Using spare UNH Extension seeds as seed seeds, if you will, users are invited to take up to five envelopes. “If their efforts are successful, we’re hoping they’ll be able to bring some seed back at the end," Lucas tells Dreher.New NH energy plan emphasizes high costs, market over state policy. Every three years, the state's energy department is required to update its 10-year plan, and the new one's just out, reports Amanda Gokee in NH Bulletin. It emphasizes rising energy costs—and blames neighboring states—and argues for "using competitive markets to determine where the state’s energy comes from," Gokee writes. The plan quickly drew the attention of energy pros in the state for appearing to back off an earlier emphasis on energy efficiency and playing down the role of state policy in advancing clean energy.Police in Brattleboro shoot, kill man sought for questioning in death of his ex-girlfriend. This all unrolled yesterday and last night, after the body of a 23-year-old Massachusetts woman who'd been missing since the weekend was found in a pickup in Brattleboro. The VSP and police in Brattleboro were seeking Matthew Davis, her former boyfriend, when a VSP detective last night recognized him in West Brattleboro. "Two troopers and a Brattleboro police officer fired their weapons in the course of the encounter with Davis, who was armed with a knife," the VSP says in a press release detailing the day's events.Black bear encounters way up. Typically, Vermont's Black Bear Project leader notes, the state sees two or three instances of bears breaking into homes a year. But this year, Jaclyn Comeau says, it's more like two or three times each week. That's because they're getting bolder, and the blame lies squarely with people. “The number one cause of this dangerous, escalating behavior is Vermonters failing to secure food sources that attract bears,” Comeau said in a press release yesterday. “This failure is putting people and bears in danger.” VTDigger's Peter D'Auria talks to Comeau about the problem and her concerns.VT Arts Council director to step down. Not only did Karen Mittelman double arts grant funding during her five years running the organization, but she "played a key role in a surge of arts advocacy that resulted in $9 million in new arts funding this year," writes Anne Wallace Allen in Seven Days. "She has changed the dialogue away from, 'the arts are good for you' into, 'the arts are a huge economic driver and a huge percentage of the workforce in Vermont,'" says state Rep. John Killacky, who used to run Burlington's Flynn Theater. Mittelman will leave at the end of October to focus on writing.“They said they don’t do chickens." That was the Burlington police department's response when Lo Fasano called to tell them about a chicken in the middle of the Church Street pedestrian mall. So Fasano took the chicken home, then put it up on Facebook. Turns out, she belonged to Rebecca Thibeault and her family—in Hinesburg, 13 miles away. They think the hen—who used to be Bug but has been re-christened Amelia, as in Earhart—crawled into the undercarriage of their Ford truck and made the ride up I-89 into town. WCAX's Darren Perron tells the story.Okay, we just need to catch up with the rest of the world on this emu thing. Taylor Blake and her family live on Knuckle Bump Farms in south Florida—she moved there from LA to help her grandparents care for their animals. In 2018, she began posting videos of the cows, donkeys, ducks, emus, and other animals on the farm. One of those emus, Emmanuel, has a thing for Blake—and for the camera, and his interruptions while she's trying to film have become a social media sensation. Then there's Ellen, the other emu, who does not want to be outdone. She features at the maroon link. Emmanuel's here. The Washington Post's backstory (gift, no paywall) is here.The Wednesday Vordle. Have at it!
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Today at 4, novelist Morgan Talty will give a reading as part of the Dartmouth English Department's Cleopatra Mathis Poetry and Prose Series. Talty, a Dartmouth grad and member of the Penobscot Nation, is winning serious critical attention for his debut collection of short stories, Night of the Living Rez, which links a dozen stories set on the Indian Island Reservation in Maine. In Sanborn Library. If you can't catch him today, he'll be one of the featured writers at tomorrow's Canaan Meetinghouse Reading.
At 6 pm, Artistree's Summer Concert Series brings songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Laurie Goldsmith to S. Pomfret, joined by upright bassist Tal Shalom-Kobi and drummer Caleb Bronz. Goldsmith started out on classical piano... then picked up her brother's guitar, which has led to decades of performing music that runs from blues to jazz to country and reggae.
At 6:30 this evening, the Howe hosts Dartmouth art history prof Mary Coffey, both in-person and online, for a talk about performance artist Marina Abramović. She's a key figure in the Howe's Everyone is Reading book this summer, The Museum of Modern Love, which uses a famous piece of her performance art at MoMA in 2010, The Artist Is Present,in which she sat at a wooden table for eight hours every day for three months, locking gazes with audience members. Coffey will talk about Abramović's work.
This evening at 7 (food at 6), the Enfield Shaker Museum continues its Stone Mill Music Series with the Michele Fay Band and its folk, swing, and bluegrass-influenced songs. Bring a picnic dinner or you'll find food to buy from the Newport NH-based food truck Let’s Get Loaded. The museum will also have snacks, beer, and non-alcoholic drinks to buy.
Tonight at 7:30, Urinetown the Musical opens for previews at Northern Stage (previews tomorrow night as well, performances through July 31). The Summer Musical Theater Intensive, with a pile of local students, takes on the Tony-winning musical about a near-future dystopia in which decades of drought have brought about water shortages so severe that private toilets have been outlawed—and an evil corporation, U.G.C., or Urine Good Company, runs the public "amenities." Lampoons everything from capitalism to musical theater itself.
And anytime from dawn to dusk, if you're looking to get out into manicured nature, the garden at the Tracy Library in New London is open for the summer. Designed in the 1920s by Olmsted Brothers (the landscape architecture firm managed at the time by Frederick Law Olmsted's sons), the garden originally had four beds of old-fashioned flowers around a wading pool for children, a large lawn, a rose garden, a peak-roofed tool house, and a variety of shrubs, vines and trees. It was restored in 2002, and is cared for by a group of volunteers, who gather to work on Monday mornings and are always looking for more help.
"A crankie is a scrolling illustration, wrapped up inside a wooden box and then hand-cranked so that it moves across a viewing screen. They used to be called 'moving panoramas' back in the day and are complete magic." That's Brendan Taaffe, a Brattleboro-based musician and composer who's got a sideline in setting crankies to music... or maybe it's the other way around. Back in 2013, he taught several of the teens involved with Village Harmony to make a crankie,
a traditional camp meeting song performed by the Bright Wings Chorus.
(Thanks, KrH!)
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 and writers who want you to 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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Written and published by Rob Gurwitt Writer/editor: Tom Haushalter Poetry editor: Michael Lipson About Rob About Tom About Michael
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