Welcome to “Dear Daybreak”, a new, occasional Daybreak column. It features short vignettes about life in the Upper Valley: an encounter, some wry exchange with a stranger or acquaintance… Anything that happened in this region or relates to it and strikes a contributor as interesting or funny or poignant—or that makes us appreciate living here. One request right now: No more poems for a few weeks, please—the larder’s full at the moment.

Dear Daybreak:

Roaring Brook Campsite, Thetford, VT, 6:47 AM

The Connecticut is museum glass over a Smithsonian painting—Thomas Cole, maybe, or Bierstadt—with blues, greens, and the glow of a warming sun. The fog is in a hurry, rushing at me over the river, but there’s no one else in line to see the view. Just me at a picnic table near the inlet where, yesterday afternoon, ten Dartmouth students arrived in five green plastic canoes.

Somewhere in the distance, cars rush by on Route 5. Up the hill, a train patiently awaits a signal to creak back to life. A bird trumpets across the river. A woodpecker drums on a trunk above my head. The symphony of morning is my private concert.

I sit at a picnic table with ten plates, ten bowls, and ten spoons still wet in the aftermath of last night’s camp stove dinner. I watch the sun steadily climb the hilltops, brilliant rays stretching, clawing for a handhold between the leaves. Soon, its rays will dry the dew on the dishes. Soon, it will wake my traveling partners—a sophomore and eight brand-new freshmen. Dishes will clang, pots will fill with water, water will boil, oats will bubble, cinnamon will sprinkle in, and breakfast will commence. But over at the campsite, nine sleeping bags lie still, side-by-side, right where we fell asleep last night under a fresco of stars.

I watch the fog dwindle in the growing light, twisting and turning like ghosts in an exorcism as it evaporates into thin air. It’s fitting, I think, that my traveling partners sleep while only I take in the last dregs of dawn. They will have many more mornings like this as Dartmouth students. Mornings to wake up in a strange place made familiar by card games and good food and college nonsense. Mornings to wake up to new traditions, possibilities, and adventures.

Perhaps, when they are seniors, they will catch their own private viewing of dawn on the Connecticut and hear the symphony of morning for themselves. For now, I let them sleep.

— A Dartmouth Senior leading her last First-Year Trip

Dear Daybreak:

growing season fades fruits of labor hang from trees harness abundance

— Ryan Haac, Sharon

Dear Daybreak:

The afternoon was simply too stunning for a person to stay indoors. Having relocated myself, my laptop and cell phone outside to the deck, I had endeavored to continue working. Reflected maple-tree branches, tinged with color, shifting in the breeze, made it hard to read the words on my screen. Two or three blue jays zipped back and forth in the clearing. A red kayak glided by on the lake, so classic! And then, a faint rustle, really close by, further diverted my attention. Could it be a field mouse setting up for winter next to the foundation, I wondered? Getting onto my hands and knees, I stuck a yardstick down through the grate and gently probed the bed of old leaves and sand below. Nothing alive popped out – but that slight crinkly sound persisted. Sunlight twinkled and twitched on a handful of curled-up leaves that had come to rest on the deck’s surface in the space just under the sliding glass doors, as it happens, right in front of my nose. A slip of a dragonfly, scarlet-bodied (can we call it a body?), was unhappily detained, with one wing pinned in the inadvertent trap, the other sputtering. A flick of my finger sprung her loose and off she flew. Whether I ever got back down to work, I am not saying.

— Rebecca Meyers, Grantham

Dear Daybreak:

Soon after moving to S. Strafford in 1976, I saw an outbuilding which gave all appearances of being on fire. I ran up to the front door and knocked insistently. I told the man who opened it, “Your garage is on fire!” He burst out laughing.