Mostly sunny, calm. It's an in-between day, with high pressure sliding east and a new system off to our west. The skies will be mostly clear all day, with calm winds from the south and highs in the low or mid 40s. Both winds and clouds pick up tonight as tomorrow's rain/mix (it all depends on where you are) approaches. Lows either side of freezing.

Silent debate. Last week, Erin Donahue's trail cam in E. Thetford caught first a red fox, then a gray fox, then a pair of coyotes marking a spot. Ted Levin writes: "Scent may be our forgotten language, but it's the lingua franca of canids. Foxes and coyotes read each others' discourses with their nose and know who's healthy. Who's not. Urine lasts two days, and face-rubbing for twenty minutes. A good face rub shortens the life expectancy of urine and weakens the message. In the case of foxes, they weaken coyotes, the more dominant of the two—and add their note at the same time."

You can almost feel it in your hand! In Lost Woods, Eddie's in search of the perfect skipping stone, and Auk's full of questions. As he will for just a few more weeks in this spot, Lebanon writer and illustrator DB Johnson chronicles the doings in his favorite patch of forest—and on his blog this week offers a glimpse ahead as Henry wakes to the morning light.

Hartford tows controversial roaming RV after weeks of complaints. Actually, reports Eric Francis for Daybreak, it's been more like months, as a former Windsor resident and other occupants moved the RV from location to location around town, including the town hall parking lot, the parking lots of the Wilder Dam, the Co-op, and the VFW—and, for the last few weeks, the Wilder Park & Ride. Neighbors there, acting town manager Paula Nulty tells Francis, had complained repeatedly about "the behavior of the occupants, the refuse and debris, the toileting, and the hazardous gas tanks being kept outside.”

Feds charge three with conspiracy to distribute crack, fentanyl. The charges yesterday come in the wake of Wednesday's early-morning raids on Valley Street in downtown Springfield, VT, but it's not clear if they stem directly from those raids, write Alan J. Keays and Ethan Weinstein in VTDigger. The men charged all faced previous charges for drug distribution in and around Springfield, though one was arrested Wednesday at his apartment in Lebanon, where an FBI search yielded two firearms, cocaine, and suspected drug proceeds, Keays and Weinstein write.

Chelsea special selectboard election draws competition for three of four seats. Ever since all but one of the five-member board resigned after an acrimonious public meeting on the town road foreman, the remaining member "has assumed the chair role but all he can do is sign checks to keep the bills paid and schedule an election," writes Darren Marcy in the Herald. That election will be Jan. 3, and seven candidates met last Monday's deadline to file. One, running to complete two months of a three-year term, faces no opponent (barring a write-in); the other seats each drew two hopefuls, Marcy reports.

SPONSORED: Support Hanover Rotary’s Bell Ringing Campaign! Tonight on Main Street, Hanover Rotary launches its annual holiday campaign to support LISTEN Community Services’ Heating Helpers program, which assists Upper Valley neighbors with fuel and electricity bills and emergency heating repairs. With rising fuel costs, our community needs your help more than ever! Every dollar donated up to $20,000 will be matched by Hanover Rotary Club and The Jack and Dorothy Byrne Foundation. To help out, click the burgundy link or see us on Main Street!  Sponsored by Hanover NH Rotary Charities, Inc.

Recreational cannabis "has taken off this fall in the White River Valley." So reports Alexa Lewis in the Herald; there are more than 25 cultivators licensed by the state Cannabis Control Board in the region—in Barnard, Strafford and S. Strafford, Tunbridge, Bethel, Chelsea, and elsewhere—and more have their applications in. Challenges remain, Lewis writes, including a testing bottleneck. “You want everyone to have a safe product and a really good product,” says a Chelsea grower, “but myself and a lot of other people could’ve had products on the shelves earlier. They’re taking so long...”

Elsewhere in the Upper Valley, cannabis businesses are lining up. The first in the region to get a license from the Cannabis Control Board to manufacture retail products using cannabis, writes Laura Koes for the Valley News, was Vermont Organic Solutions in Norwich, founded in 2010 to create remedies for pain and other ailments. In Woodstock, the Clover Gift Shop's PJ Eames has opened the region's first licensed retailer, Sunday Table, next to Worthy Kitchen. “I didn’t know what to expect. It’s been a really nice steady flow of people," Eames tells Koes. A retailer in Windsor is awaiting his license.

"A terrific production that will appeal, in words made famous by Nat King Cole, 'to kids from 1 to 92.'" It's fair to say that VN freelancer Eric Sutphin liked Northern Stage's production of The Railway Children: the production details, the choreography and music, the acting—especially by the alternating cast of kids who, he writes, "fully inhabit their characters"—and the theme of fresh arrivals to the Upper Valley uprooted from urban comforts and finding a new community. He was struck, too, by the crowd: "full of 30-something friend groups, couples of all ages, teenagers and, of course, families."

How many former middle-school principals do you know who go to state dinners at the White House? If you had a kid at Hanover's Richmond Middle School a while back, at least one. An eagle-eyed reader points out that Susan Finer was on the guest list for the grand White House dinner last night in honor of visiting French President Emmanuel Macron and his wife, Brigitte. Finer accompanied her son, Jonathan, who went to Hanover High, worked for a time as a Washington Post foreign correspondent, and is now principal deputy national security adviser. (Thanks, CJ!)

SPONSORED: Buy a calendar, support local trails! The Upper Valley Trails Alliance has collaborated with photographer and trail enthusiast Jay Davis (whose photos you've seen in Daybreak) to create a calendar with exquisite photos of our beloved Upper Valley trails. All proceeds from calendar sales will benefit the Trails Alliance and help keep these beautiful trails in good shape! Available for pre-order now thru December 9th only! Hit the burgundy link to reserve your calendar today! Sponsored by the Upper Valley Trails Alliance.

Hiking Close to Home: Marsh-Billings' Pogue Loop. The UVTA this week highlights this easy hike in the Marsh-Billings-Rockefeller National Historical Park. From the trailhead, follow McKenzie Trail/road through a beautiful forest with a long history of thoughtful management and conservation. Take a right on the North Ridge Loop and another toward the Pogue loop for a lovely and flat walk around this beautiful pond. From there you can return or explore, including climbing Mt. Tom Road to the South Peak for a lovely view of Woodstock. The parking area is less than a mile on the left off Prosper Road from Rte. 12.

Been paying attention to Daybreak this week? Because the Upper Valley News Quiz has some questions for you. Like, what kind of aircraft was involved in that crash in Haverhill last weekend? And how many samosas a day does Global Village Foods produce? And just where did Marsh Brothers Scott and Bud cut their teeth in the food business? You'll find those and other questions at the burgundy link.

But wait! How closely were you following VT and NH?

• Because Seven Days wants to know if you know what's been going on around the state this week—including, which celebrity named Randy bought a home on Burlington's Randy Lane last week?
• And NHPR's got a whole set of questions about doings in the Granite State—including, what did a Windham man find after digging through trash at the transfer station last week?

NH Ag Secretary faces uncomfortable moments at renomination hearing. Shawn Jasper, a former House speaker, admitted that he comes from "a long line of strong Type A personalities" at an Exec Council hearing yesterday on whether to give him a second term, reports InDepthNH's Paula Tracy. The tenor of the comments was pretty much summed up by Democrat Cinde Warmington, who told him, "You have quite a fan club and quite a few people who are mad at you." Complaints focus on what some farmers called his “unwillingness to listen to opposing views” and "vindictive" actions.

VT wildlife experts investigate deaths of 21 geese at lake in Barton. The discovery—by two men out searching the lakeshore with metal detectors last week—is reminiscent of the deaths of 30 geese from avian flu in NH last spring, VT Fish & Wildlife's David Sausville tells WCAX's Rachel Mann. The state has sent samples to a lab in Wisconsin; results won't be available for a week or two. “They anticipate it’ll be avian influenza or aspergillosis (a fungal disease that can affect wild birds) or something like that," he says.

VT settles on religious school tuition. The state's Agency of Education and several school districts agreed to pay tuition costs and legal fees to five families that had sued them seeking to force Vermont to pay for students to attend religious schools if their towns do not have a public school. The settlement, writes the AP's Lisa Rathke, comes in the wake of a US Supreme Court ruling in June holding that Maine could not exclude religious schools from its program offering tuition aid for private education.

After three years at the helm of UVM—most of that time navigating a pandemic—Suresh Garimella seeks to reintroduce himself. His "mass communication style, which tends to be heavy on prepared statements and scripted video messages, has not always endeared him to the university at large," writes Seven Days' Chelsea Edgar in her deeply reported profile, leaving him open to accusations of callousness and too great a distance from students and faculty. At the same time, this year's freshman class is UVM's largest ever, he's kept tuition flat, and has boosted research funding to an all-time high.

It's not just us! Remember the wandering Strafford/Norwich emu? Well, out in Michigan, the Kalamazoo County Sheriff's Office got called in yesterday morning to track down a report of six emus on the loose. It took a couple of hours, but they found the owners and wrangled the emus. "Never a dull moment," they comment on their FB page. Here's body cam footage and a report from MLive.

The Friday Vordle. If you're new to Vordle, you should know that fresh ones appear on weekends using words from the Friday Daybreak, and you can get a reminder email each weekend morning. If you'd like that, sign up here.

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

• At 3:30 this afternoon, the North Country Chordsmen and VoxStars pile into the New Books area of the Howe Library in Hanover for a free holiday concert.
• And, of course, it's First Friday in WRJ, and there's music, food, art and more for the asking, along with stores and restaurants all a-twinkle for the holidays. Fittingly, from 5-7 at JAM (5 S. Main) an all new swing and hot jazz project called Route 5 Jive launches. It features Jakob Breitbach, Kit Creeger, Christopher Billiau, and guests. Then at 7, Valley Improv takes over the JAM space, with the audience offering ideas and the players making up plot, characters and dialogue on the spot. Meanwhile, starting at 5:30 Open Door's got a donation-based movement class going (with half the proceeds to Good Neighbor Health Clinic), and starting at 6 pm it's Latin music night at the Main Street Museum, with piano rolls at 6 and then a Reggaetón dance party starting at 8. Nando Jaramillo's Moon & Stars arepa truck will be on hand as well. Over in the TipTop Building there'll be a variety of open studios, including printmaker Jess Raymond and photographer Will Freihofer showing their work in Speakeasy Studio. Long River Gallery's crammed with work from local artists and holiday items. And from 5-9, Kishka Gallery hosts an opening reception for "Festival of Lights," its group exhibit of handmade, one-of-a-kind lamps by a variety of artists.
• At 6 pm, the Unitarian Universalist Congregation of the Upper Valley on Rt. 5 in Norwich hosts an opening reception and panel discussion for "How We Dwell: Home, Art, and Justice." It's focused on a new exhibition of patchwork quilts by Georgia Goldsborough and emergency geodesic shelters by Simon Dennis. Goldsborough's quilts are pieced together from collected fabric scraps she's collected, and, write the exhibition organizers, "This rich display of domestic culture provides a context, through stark juxtaposition, for a conversation about the way municipal codes that prohibit the creation and occupation of emergency shelters impact the lives of our neighbors who need it."
• At 7 pm, it's opening night for this weekend's run of The Addams Family by Lebanon High School's Wet Paint Players. It's Wednesday-forward after she falls in love with a guy from normal family, tells her dad and swears him to secrecy—and then the guy and his family come to dinner. Tomorrow also at 7, Sunday at 1.
• At 7:30 this evening, Classicopia kicks off a four-performance weekend run of "Four-Hand Holiday" with Elizabeth Borowsky and Daniel Weiser at the same piano—"a thrilling ballet of twenty fingers," as they put it, performing arrangements of holiday classics like “Sleigh Ride,” “White Christmas,” plus selections from Tchaikovsky’s “Nutcracker Suite” and the “Blue Danube Waltz” by Strauss. Tonight's at the Old South Church in Windsor, tomorrow they're at Fairlee Town Hall and the home of Marilyn and Al Austin-Nelson in Hanover, and Sunday afternoon they're at the First Congregational Church of Lebanon.
• Meanwhile, tonight at the First Congregational Church of Lebanon, the Anonymous Coffeehouse starts up at 7:30 with Massachusetts-based songwriter and folk guitarist Tabitha Ibon, who's originally from Phnom Penh, Cambodia. She's followed at 8:15 by Vietnamese-born guitarist and pianist Steve Hartmann, and then at 9 by guitarist and songwriter Hiroya Tsukamoto.
• Tomorrow from 1-3, the Norwich Bookstore hosts legendary Vermont birder Fred Pratt for a signing of his new book, My Big Year. Pratt (known as "Pat") spent eight years trying to document 150 bird species in all of Vermont’s 14 counties, each within a calendar year—a quest he pursued with his wife, Chris, until her death in 2017, and then with help from the VT birding community. This is a signing only, though he'll be happy to chat as he signs.
• It's Upper Valley Music Center's holiday music festival, and tomorrow at 1:15 at UVMC they host "'Tis the Session," your chance to play along to traditional tunes with UVMC Faculty and students (with informal jamming afterward); an open house starting at 2, and caroling by the tree in Colburn Park at 4:45.
• At 6:30 pm tomorrow, East Coast Van Builds in Bradford VT brings master Ghanian percussionist Mohammed Alidu and fusion specialists Kotoko Brass in to their listening room for a free, all-ages world music performance. Alidu, who's collaborated over the years with the Playing For Change Band (their foundation supported a music school he founded in northern Ghana), Peter Gabriel, Baaba Maal, and others. Kotoko Brass features musicians from Ghana, Antigua, Japan, and the US. Drums and brass: You know you'll be on your feet the whole time.
• Finally, at 7 tomorrow evening, the stage at Sawtooth Kitchen brings in Montpelier-based blues guitarist and singer Dave Keller and his band.

Written and published by Rob Gurwitt         Banner by: Tom Haushalter    Poetry editor: Michael Lipson  
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