GOOD MORNING, UPPER VALLEY!
Mostly cloudy, cooler. We're pretty much back to seasonal norms, though it may be muggier than usual today. Which is okay, since with temps only getting up into the mid-70s, it's not going to feel remotely like the weekend. Slight chance of showers this morning, winds from the northwest, clouds may start parting in the early afternoon. Back down to 60-ish tonight.Bee scout. The other morning, Lisa Lacasse noticed this bee hanging onto a flower stalk in Quechee. It stayed at least five minutes, she reports—and wondered what that was all about. Well, the VT Center for Ecostudies' bee expert, Spencer Hardy, has an answer. It's most likely a Brown-belted Bumblebee, he says, and bumble males "spend a lot of time on a high perch where they watch for females to fly by. I've heard they've even been seen sitting on the Empire State Building! They'll sit still till they see something that looks like a female, then chase after it." No comment.Copeland Hanzas wins Democratic primary for VT secretary of state. At least, as of the wee hours the Bradford state rep held a narrow, 1,934-vote lead out of 100,019 votes cast over her nearest opponent, deputy Secy of State Chris Winters, in unofficial results. A third candidate, Montpelier City Clerk John Odum, trailed substantially. All but one precinct have reported. Assuming her victory stands, Copeland Hanzas will face Republican H. Brooke Paige (who also won the GOP nominations for attorney general, treasurer, and auditor) on the November ballot.In other contested statewide contests in VT...
Former Lt. Gov. David Zuckerman won the Democratic nomination for his old post, and will run against Republican state senate veteran Joe Benning in the general election. “We're both libertarians at heart,” Benning tells VTDigger's Emma Cotton.
Charity Clark, who served four years as outgoing Attorney General TJ Donovan's chief of staff, won the Democratic nomination to replace him, defeating Washington County State's Attorney Rory Thibault by a commanding 58 percent to 28 percent. "People were excited to vote for a qualified woman, and to shatter the glass ceiling at the AG’s office,” Clark tells Seven Days' Colin Flanders.
In unofficial results, former VT education secretary Rebecca Holcombe carried Norwich, Thetford, and Strafford in the two-seat, four-town Windsor Orange 2 district, garnering 1,983 votes to 1,662 for incumbent Jim Masland and 1,072 for Diedre "Dee" Gish. In the three-way contest for the two-seat Windsor 6 district in Hartford, newcomer Esme Cole of WRJ was the top vote-getter, with 992 votes to incumbent Kevin "Coach" Christie's 959. Former Progressive Nicholas Bramlage trailed. You can check out any state House race at the link. The site for state Senate contests went down early in the evening and hadn't been restored as of this morning.
SPONSORED: Got Landline? Get imp™. And stop every single unwanted call. Seriously. imp is the call-screening, scam-fighting, time-saving landline solution that actually works. That means no more spam, scam, robo, or even political calls will make your phone ring. Headquartered in the Upper Valley, we’re sticking with our roots, making our first public announcement here with Daybreak before launching nationally. To learn more and pick up your own imp visit www.joinimp.com. Sponsored by imp.CT River Valley: "In some of these wells which have data going back a few decades, these are historically low conditions.” That was Ted Diers, who administers NH's Watershed Management Bureau, filling in the state's drought management team on Monday. How could this be, despite decent rain? The problem is groundwater: sudden rains that run off quickly between long dry spells, along with erratic snowpack, mean the water we rely on is diminishing. NHPR story on the impact on farming, forestry, and homes at the burgundy link, David Brooks story in the Monitor on groundwater here. So around here, towns are aiming to limit water use. In the Valley News, Frances Mize reports that moderate drought conditions are leading communities to ask or require residents to use less water. Lebanon has imposed mandatory restrictions on lawn and landscape watering, while Claremont is asking for voluntary limits on "non-essential water use." Same up north in Newbury, VT.You could spend years battling your knotweed. Or you could just pickle it. Yesterday's item on approaches to getting rid of Japanese knotweed brought a link from Windsor forager and wild-food educator Carolyn Dugas to her recipe for peppermint knotweed pickles. It all started, she writes, at a wild-food feast in North Carolina. Not a pickle fan, she ventured a tentative taste. "Their crunch reverberated in the air, while the peppermint cooled my adventure-worn soul." She was hooked—and after moving north to knotweed heaven, perfected the recipe. As she says: Eat pickles, help the environment!In Post Mills, ex-landfill site casts a shadow over progress on solar, housing. It's been closed since 1989, writes Li Shen in Sidenote, but what...stuff...is still leaching into the area's groundwater remains unknown. A move to create a large solar installation depends on finding $10K for a study that would let a potential owner seek legal protection from liability for whatever's in the ground. Without that study, Shen writes, "Residents in south Post Mills are uncertain whether they can create more residential lots or even start businesses that increase water consumption, such as raising livestock."It's just August—still time for a deep mystery dive. Dublin in the 1950s "was a beautiful city, dingy and ramshackle with a melancholy beauty–most of which is gone now." But, still, the perfect setting for a mystery series, which is why the novelist John Banville, writing as Benjamin Black, set his crime stories about a troubled pathologist, Quirke, there. In this week's Enthusiasms, Liza Bernard draws our attention to the Quirke books and to Susan Hill's contemporary series set in a small English cathedral town. Though, she writes, "these are not your gentle, cozy mysteries."Nexus returns this weekend. Music, dance, art, singalongs, jam-alongs... It all takes over the park, streets, mall, and tunnel of downtown Lebanon starting on Friday, as the Lebanon Opera House reprises its highly successful free music festival, launched last summer after the pandemic shut down its indoor space. As LOH director Joe Clifford writes, "Nexus embodies the things we value most at LOH: providing broad accessibility to the arts, creating a professional and friendly atmosphere, and sparking joy and delight in our community." In Artful, Susan Apel offers a look ahead.NH updates guidance on absentee ballots. Unlike in VT, you need an excuse to request an absentee ballot in the state—or at least, you do now that expanded Covid-era rules have expired. But Secy of State David Scanlan has clarified things for town clerks, reports NHPR's Casey McDermott: Voters who need to avoid going out in public for health reasons can request to vote absentee. Same for those who can't make it to the polls for religious reasons, work or caregiving responsibilities, or plans to be out of town on Election Day.And speaking of the NH elections... Primary day is Sept. 13, and in a commentary in NH Bulletin, former Conway town moderator Deb Fauver offers some quick advice on getting ready. Starting with https://app.sos.nh.gov/viphome, where you can check not only your polling location but your registration. This matters because about 40 percent of NH voters are undeclared as to party, and if you choose a D or R ballot on the 13th and then don't sign a “Return to Undeclared” form on your way out the door, you'll automatically be registered to the party you chose. Lots more info at the link.The public gets a chance to weigh in on Mt. Washington's master plan. Two chances, actually, and you've gotta figure that if 30,000 people so far have signed onto a Change.org petition opposing a bid by the owner of the cog railway to create a hotel using 18 sleeper cars at 5,800 feet, there's a lot of interest. Every ten years, writes Amanda Gokee in NH Bulletin, the Mount Washington Commission is required to update its master plan for the mountain, including infrastructure needs, upgrades, possible development, and so on. Public sessions are in N. Conway and Concord Aug. 22 and 23.Are we hearing the final, fading notes of the American piano? More often than you see one entering a house nowadays, you watch a piano be removed. And in all likelihood, that old baby upright isn’t salvageable. David Brooks at Granite Geek pens something of eulogy—a dirge, if you will—for the beautiful and formidable instrument that, a century ago, was a fixture and main source of entertainment in many homes. With fewer kids learning keys, or simply learning on electronic keyboards, new piano sales are dwindling…and if old ones don’t end up on a scrap heap, at least some people still like to collect them.“When an 80-year-old woman making $700 a month gets a $1,700 dental estimate for her little Foo-Foo, you might as well tell her it’s $10,000, because it’s that unattainable." Which is why veterinary nurse Deb Glottmann and veterinarian Connie Riggs created the Mitzvah Fund—and, more particularly, its 34-foot-long mobile veterinary clinic. They provide free or low-cost veterinary care to low-income Vermonters, "with a preference for the elderly and veterans, first responders, and people who are homeless," writes Anne Wallace Allen in a Seven Days profile. They'll even make house calls.The grammarian uniting people around “the power of language.” To say Ellen Jovin loves grammar is an understatement: “I’ve studied twenty-five languages for fun.” How to share that love with others was the question. So on a whim she checked the law on offering free grammar advice, then set up table and chair on 72nd St. in Manhattan with a sign that simply read “Grammar Table.” In a book excerpt at Lit Hub, Jovin describes what her movable venue for hearing people’s “capitalization complaints” and “semicolonphobia” taught her about the “complex linguistic glue that binds us together as human beings.”The Wednesday Vordle. If you're new to it, this is the Upper Valley version of Wordle, with a five-letter word that relates to an item in the previous day's Daybreak. Give it a shot!
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At 6 pm, Artistree's weekly "Music on the Hill" series in South Pomfret continues with Rose Hip Jam—hard-working folk musicians Kerry Rosenthal and Steve Glazer on guitar and vocals, jazz vet Eric Bronstein on bass. Bring a picnic.
At 6:30 this evening, filmmaker and animator Meredith Holch will be at the Peabody Library in Post Mills for an "old time crankie picture show." It's evening of storytelling, but a particular kind of storytelling, with, as the library puts it, "one woman, a box with a crank, and musical interludes."
And also at 6:30, Hartford Parks and Rec brings Gerry Grimo and the East Bay Jazz Ensemble to the stage at Lyman Point Park in WRJ.
And also at 6:30, folk trio Never Too Late takes the Orford Bandstand:Hilde Ojibway, Adam Sorscher and Sharon Whyte playing original songs by Ojibway as well as classics by Tom Paxton, Kate Wolfe, Pete Seeger, and others.
And music to start the day.
A couple of weeks ago, during the Newport Folk Festival, Denver-based singer-songwriter Nathaniel Rateliff and his band, the Night Sweats, did a set in honor of Paul Simon. They rocked out on a few classics (“Kodachrome," “Me and Julio”), brought out Natalie Merchant and other guests for various other songs... and then, to thunderous approval, brought out Simon himself. Who, in turn,
The sound quality could use improving, the visuals are awkward... but still, it's spellbinding.
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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