Morning sky in Orford, by Sarah Davie. Who writes, “No filters!”
Welcome to “Dear Daybreak”, a weekly Daybreak column. It features short vignettes about life in the Upper Valley: an encounter, a wry exchange, a poem or anecdote or reflection… Anything that happened in this region or relates to it and that might strike us all as interesting or funny or poignant.
Want to submit your own Dear Daybreak item? Just go here!
Dear Daybreak:
Although this story begins in Canada, its happy-ever-after ends in the Upper Valley.
Last Labor Day weekend, I spent a magical time in Quebec City (three rainbows in three days!). When I got home, however, I realized I’d left behind my beloved Patagonia raincoat, which is also the shell for my down winter coat. I emailed the place I had stayed, and they had indeed found my jacket. Several days and multiple emails ensued. Eventually, a staff person called to report they would not be able to mail it back to me due to a certain President’s adversarial economic policies toward Canada.
A friend suggested I try the always helpful Norwich listserv. Sure enough, several people replied to my plight, saying that they might be traveling to Canada, though no one was going to Quebec City. Then, a very nice Norwich resident messaged to say he’d be in Montreal soon on business. If I could get the jacket there, he would bring it back with him. After many more email exchanges with the Quebec City hotel, I arranged for the jacket to be mailed within Canada to a Montreal address my Norwich contact provided. I paid for express delivery in order for it to arrive before he had to return home.
The next day the Canadian Postal Service went on strike.
For weeks, I checked the delivery status of the jacket and for weeks it said it was “delayed.” At last the strike ended, the jacket was delivered to Montreal. Of course, my contact was back in Vermont by then, so now the challenge was once again how to get it from Canada to Norwich. I briefly considered driving the two hours to retrieve it. But my Norwich contact said he would ask friends if they might be visiting their son, a McGill University student, anytime soon.
By then it was early October. Finally, at month’s end, my contact wrote with the news that his friends had dropped off the jacket. We arranged for me to pick it up at his house, where he would leave it in a bag on top of his woodpile. As he said, “Quite the travel adventure your coat has had!”
And I say, how lucky to live in the Upper Valley, where, whenever it takes a village to get something done, the village rises to the challenge.
— Robin Dellabough, Norwich
Dear Daybreak:
Two cats on my porch
Mirror image commas
Bracket my joy
— Kathy Manning, West Hartford
Dear Daybreak:
Last Friday, Halloween night, my husband watched our traditional scary movie, Halloween, which still creeps me out. In the middle of the night, we were awakened by a very strange noise outside—a noise we’d never heard before. Given the movie, my imagination was running wild: Had The Thing come back to life? My husband got up and looked through the windows but couldn’t see anything.
We talked about the noise off and on throughout the next day. We looked for any animal tracks. Nothing.
Then, while we were watching TV that night, we heard it again. We raced outside with a flashlight and found the biggest porcupine we had ever seen. After it ran into the woods, we came back in, and I started wondering: Was this porcupine mating season?
Sure enough, Google says it is—and gave some recordings of their mating call. That’s what we’d heard! After living in this area for almost 20 years, I thought we had heard everything, but clearly, I had not heard the mating call of the porcupine. Who knew?
— Lynn Kisselbach, Grantham
And did you miss Dear Daybreak last week? You’ll find it here.