Dear Upper Valley neighbors,
Join us at 4pm out front of the Upper Valley Food Coop on Friday, October 3rd (downtown White River’s next First Friday) for a guided tour of the downtown, highlighting our local edible gardens and community resilience initiatives. We’ll head out from the UVFC at 4pm to begin our exploring, ending up at the Hazelwood Forest Garden as our ultimate destination, before making a loop back - about a mile in total.
This walk is dedicated to the Vermont Reads’ 2025 novel, The Light Pirate, by Lily Brooks Dalton, and so our guides will include widely-connected local leaders in community resilience organizing - including representatives from the Hartford Hub and Quechee Library. Come learn about regional groups currently engaged in community resilience work, in addition to ways that you might enjoy individually getting involved with this shared goal. Please send a note to
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Vermont Reads’ 2025 Book of the Year, The Light Pirate is an upsetting yet uplifting new novel by Lily Brooks Dalton (available at your local library). It may take place deep down on the Florida peninsula, but the characters and tragedies and triumphs - and occasional cataclysmic weather event - will inevitably remind you of your neighbors and your own life here, and the narratives that we all navigate in our Vermont neck of the woods.
In addition to trying to keep the lights on for his own family, The Light Pirate’s patriarch Kirby is also in charge of keeping the lights on for their whole hurricane-plagued county: he’s the foreman of a crew of workers (called “linemen” in the industry) responsible for maintaining electrical transmission throughout a crumbling cast of cables that compose what’s left of the state’s energy infrastructure. Not only does he head out to work each time as the hurricanes approach, he continues to do so long after the majority of neighbors and businesses and local leaders have already fled –
The state of mind of assembling one’s tools for the workday while watching a hurricane steadily approach is just one experience offered in reading this year’s Vermont Reads choice. And this is one state of mind we’ll be exploring as we go about town on Friday, October 3rd. We hope you’ll dust off your tools and join in the conversation.
Best wishes and hope to see you,
The Upper Valley Food Coop, Hartford Hub, and Quechee Library
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