Grange Notes by Tim Swartz, Grange President (with everyone’s help), July 31, 2019
Join us for a tasty summer dinner on Saturday
It’s time for some mid-summer socializing…and eating! Granges have been noted for enjoying food together for as long as they have been around…and we are pleased to be part of that tradition! Our Midsummer Cookout Potluck Dinner will start at 5:30 PM, Saturday August 3rd.
We’re taking our usual Community Potluck to the next level this month–we’re providing the main course and dessert! We’ve gotten some generous donations already, and we’ll happily accept some more, but come and join us in any case!
The Grange will buy some burgers–meat and veggie-burgers and some kind of dogs. O Bread bakery is making us hamburger buns on Friday. We’ve gotten a generous donation from a Grange member who wants to remain anonymous, so we can get some good ice cream! A farmer friend of Alison Forrest, our head cook, is donating some tomatoes and cucumbers. Alison is planning to make a big potato salad and a big tomato salad! We ask everyone to bring some side-dishes: more salads, chips, dips, vegetables, popsicles, non-dairy frozen treats? Bring your favorites to share! We have freezer space to keep things cold until it’s time to consume them.
We’ll have a couple of grills, and we’ll supply as usual we can supply all the dishes, silverware, serving spoons, etc. We hope you will join us for a sociable evening.
While Grange food expert Alison Forrest is our overall grill-meister, she also needs a few volunteers to prep food and to help flip the burgers, grill veggies, etc. , starting around 4:00 on Saturday. Please contact her via email, or reply to me (Tim), or call me: 802-225-8921, to sign up. There’s a picture of her in action at a previous cookout, below.
Regular Grange meetings will start up again in September, on the third Saturday, Sept. 21st. I’m shifting the meeting from the first Saturday because the VT State Grange is having its Fall Festival on Sept. 7th–and will be holding their own contra dance that evening! I’m hoping some Capital City Grange dancers will join me to dance with the State Grange members, at the VT State Grange summer camp, in Brookfield on Sept. 7th. Get in touch with me if you can join us.
But let’s not think about the end of summer just yet–join us to celebrate the warm weather while it lasts. If we get an update on our grant proposal, we’ll certainly want to celebrate that as well on August 3rd!
Reprinted: June 10th: community service by U-32 helps our sign keep its footing
When
I sent out this article in the last Grange Notes, I had misplaced my
list of the U-32 volunteers, so I’m adding them in this version. My
apologies for the delayed attribution!
We were lucky to have volunteers from the U-32 High School “Senior
Community Service” day come to our Grange Hall to help us with a
project. As you can see in the photos above, 3 seniors (Addie Hannah, Katerina Wood & Jess Colnes) plus a driver/leader (Kit Walker)
pitched in on a project that needed to be done: the footing of the
Grange sign closer to Rt. 12 has been getting exposed by erosion–runoff
from the driveway, plus from the roadway has been exposing more and
more of it. It’s important to keep the footing buried to reduce the
chance of frost heaving.
So I asked for help to move some large rocks, left over from the
flower-bed project by the “new” Main Entrance. The students and I
lifted them into the back of my tiny Yaris “truck” and ferried them down
to the sign. We piled them around the footing, to resist the erosion
by rushing water, reinforcing them with other stones and covering it
over with dirt, to divert the water around the footing. This was
purely “seat of the pants” engineering, so I’ve been keeping an eye on
it as the summer rains continue–thus far it is holding up well.
After that, they helped with one more chore, cleaning out the dirt from
the silt-trap set up by Grange super-volunteer Lewis Neill, when he
single-handedly replaced the culvert under the top of the driveway.
The trap keeps dirt from washing in and blocking up the culvert, so it’s
important to keep cleaning out the accumulated silt.
Many thanks to the volunteers, and we hope this experience encourages
them to find enjoyment in service work throughout their lives!