Grange Notes by Tim Swartz, Grange President (with everyone’s help) January 14, 2026
It’s almost time: Friday
Jan. 16 Blood Drive
Walk-in, or make an appointment
The Red Cross is reporting a critical need for blood donors–as is often the case, the holidays plus winter weather tend to reduce the number of donors this time of year. You can make a difference, by coming to the Red Cross Blood Drive on Friday, Jan. 16, from 10:30 AM to 3:00 PM, at the Grange Hall. We’ve got a good number of appointments still open–and as our sign says, we welcome walk-ins!
If you want to sign up: just click this link, and you’ll see our currently scheduled blood drives. Click “See Times” and you can choose when you want to donate whole blood, or do a “Power Red” donation *.
We’ve got a few U-32 students who have volunteered to help out at the beginning of the drive, plus Liz Benjamin has also volunteered to help wipe down beds and serve snacks and beverages to donors. If you want to help out in the afternoon, please contact me via email: swartztim15@gmail.com. I will be staffing the welcome desk for the drive; Red Cross folks will train you (and me–it’s my first time as a volunteer, not a donor). Come join the fun!
* If you’re not familiar with Power Red donations, it’s a way to donate two unit’s worth of red blood cells. It takes a little longer than donating blood, but you can only donate every 16 weeks. If you want to hear more, email me, Tim–I’ve been making Power Red donations for about a decade! Or, you can learn about all types of blood donations at this Red Cross page.
All donors before Jan. 25 also can win a chance for a Super Bowl trip, with airfare to San Francisco, hotel and a $1,000 gift card.
January, 2026 Grange Meeting report
- We discussed the increase in dues required by the National and State Granges to $30, and voted to increase our annual dues to $36. This continues to provide us $6 per year, per member from dues payments. The maintenance of the Grange Hall depends entirely on rental income, not on dues. To renew your existing membership for 2026, please send checks (made out to Capital City Grange) to PO Box 234, Northfield Falls VT 05664. If you want to join as a new member, click this link to go to the Grange website page where you can open a fillable-PDF application form, which has all the instructions to send your check and form to our Secretary.
- We discussed the need for increased rental income, to meet the increased costs due to inflation. Merry Shernock, our (volunteer) Rental Agent has been contacting our regular renters, many of whom have been tenants for decades, and has gotten a positive response to our request for them to let us know how much they can reasonably afford to increase their payments. We appreciate all they do, along with the Grange, to provide a rich menu of cultural opportunities to the residents of Central VT! Merry has also increased the rents charged to new renters. We will continue to monitor our cash-flow and bills to see how things develop. We have been taking these actions prudently, well before we reach any crisis or panic!
- We discussed the requirement that the State Grange now has, that Community Granges like ours perform one of the “4 Degrees” rituals every year, starting with the First Degree this year. We came up with a preliminary plan to have it on a Sunday afternoon in May, to be followed by a potluck–and to combine it with our annual Grange cooking contest–which this year will be a Chili Cook-off. We also hope to combine forces with North Branch Grange (in Worcester) and Caledonia Grange (in E. Hardwick) to put on the Degree Ritual. We think it will take somewhere around an hour. I will be sending out PDF copies of the ritual to paid-up Grange members soon.
- We’ve gotten a great start on the Friends of the Capital City Grange Hall’s “Indoor Air Quality Improvement” project, with the ERV and the 14″ supply duct installed just before Christmas. Peak Mechanical will install and set up the controls for the system next week, we expect, so that we can start using it.
- The new Iso-Aire ceiling mounted air purifier is installed, and a “smart outlet” allows us to schedule it to run when the Grange Hall is rented. So far, all the feedback is good–it’s considerably quieter than the 4–home-made “Room Air Filtration Boxes” we built in 2021, which have now been taken down.
- We also talked about the Red Cross Blood Drive–see above–which we hope you will take part in. We think it is a great way to use our Hall to serve a truly “life or death” need.
February 7: another excellent program, featuring Erica Heilman!
Many of you are familiar with the audio pieces produced by Erica Heilman, of East Calais; her “Rumble Strip Vermont” podcasts are heard on Vermont Public every Sunday morning. Back episodes can also be heard on your favorite podcast app, going back to 2013 when she started it.
When our Grange Lecturer, Patty Giavara asked Erica to describe what she’d like to talk about, she said “Rumble Strip Vermont: Making stories in the closet. In this hour, we’ll talk about the art of interviewing, the horrors of editing, and what’s the point anyway? We can all figure that last part out together.”
On the RumbleStripVermont website, she describes her stories as: Erica Heilman invites herself into people’s homes to find out what they know, hate, love, what they’re afraid of, and what makes them more like you than you’d realized. These are messy, obsessively crafted stories of the everyday.”
She has won a Peabody award for her episode “Finn and the Bell”, and been named as the #1 podcast for 2020 by The Atlantic and for 2022 by The New Yorker–among other awards. We hope you will come and hear her own stories in person!
The program will start at 5:00 PM on Feb. 7 at the Grange; you can also attend virtually using the Zoom link in the Program listing on the Grange website Calendar: https://
I’m sorry to report…
..that the 2–30″ x 60″ tables that have been missing for at least a few months now have not been returned. To be clear, these were not “loaned” to anyone, they just disappeared. Possibly a renter used them, and they were taken by accident–though all have “Property of Capital City Grange” labels on the bottom surface. We will need to purchase replacements.