At the Tunbridge Fair, by Kathy Smith
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,
Last month, we got married! Our wedding was a 4-day extravaganza celebrating everything we love about living in Hanover.
Although we both grew up in Los Angeles, went to the same college, and are the same age, we didn’t meet until we bumped into each other in Hanover one fall evening in 2016. Emma had just started a PhD program at Dartmouth, and Jason was visiting a friend for the weekend. Eventually Jason moved to Hanover so we could be together. As we got to know each other, we also got to know Hanover and the wider Upper Valley. We fell in love with this area as we fell in love with each other. When we decided to get married, we knew we wanted to use our wedding as an opportunity to show off this special place to our family and friends.
Since Jason is a former teacher at Hanover High School and Emma is a current postdoc at Dartmouth, we made sure these places were well represented during the festivities. Our wedding ceremony was on the high school’s turf field (complete with live music from the Upper Valley Community Band and an appearance by the Hanover High mascot as our ring bear-er), and we hosted a series of academic talks in a Dartmouth lecture hall plus a lunch at Foco (Dartmouth’s dining hall).
Yet that’s only the tip of the iceberg! We also hosted breakfasts at The Works, the Hanover High School cafeteria, and with Perspective Catering; lunches at Tacos y Tequila and Six South Street Hotel (with catering from Jersey Mike’s); dinners at Ramunto’s, Cloudland Farm, the Hanover Inn, and Molly’s; and a late-night dance party at Sawtooth. Activities included a contra dance called by Ben Sachs-Hamilton (whom we first heard at Tracy Hall), magic by Marko the Magician, boating at the Ledyard Canoe Club, a guided tour of the Hood museum, and workout classes with an instructor from The Studio in WRJ. Along the way, we had exceptional support from Simply Beeutiful Events, Allioops!, Hanover Parks & Rec, and the Hanover Fire Department.
We are so incredibly grateful to each and every single one of these folks for welcoming our guests to the Upper Valley and making Hanover feel like a home!
We have loved building a life here and were thrilled by the opportunity to share it with friends and family. After canoeing in the Connecticut for the first time, Emma’s cousin—who has spent his entire life in Los Angeles—declared, “I might not be a city boy after all.”
— Emma Templeton & Jason Hirschhorn, Hanover
Dear Daybreak:
I have lived in Vermont for 50 years on the Beaver Meadow Road in Sharon. Was driving in to Norwich around 5:45 pm when, just before the American Legion building, I noticed three or four birds in and on the road. Though I wasn’t speeding I had to lock up my brakes to avoid hitting one of these insane birds—who ran right under my front wheels. It was then that I noticed the iridescent green band of feathers at the base of its neck: a ring-necked pheasant! In 50 years in Vermont I have never seen a ring-necked pheasant here, but I am quite familiar with them as I grew up in rural northern NJ and summered in upstate NY. Are they native and/or common? Please enlighten me.
— Matt Cardillo, Sharon. Naturalist Ted Levin replies: Ring-necked pheasants are native to neither Vermont nor New York. They’re native to Asia. They were introduced to the US to increase game-bird hunting opportunities. Pheasants are raised locally by several breeders. One possibility, as a local birder tells Matt: They made a break under the fence from a game preserve.
Dear Daybreak:
I’m sending you my music video entitled, “Your Birthday.” It’s mostly made of film from the 1920’s onward but has some of my animation as well. Both grandfathers were early adaptors of movie cameras, so there was lots of content available. I did the video so that there’d be one more option for people to use whenever someone’s birthday rolled around. Note: Craig Pinto of The Pencilnecks added acoustic guitar and bass tracks to the music.
— John Stadler, Lyme
And did you miss Dear Daybreak last week? Here it is!