If you’re unfamiliar with our Feed a Family event, we typically hold this event twice a year with one drive in the winter and another for summer. The summer version of Feed a Family is arguably the most important of the year. Families have kids off from school and are looking to make ends meet, not just at the dinner table but with everyday essentials. The point of our Feed a Family drive is to fight hunger in our local communities by teaming up with gracious hosts, kind sponsors, and very helpful non-profits to tackle it all.

This first round of our Feed a Family event is taking place in Rutland, Vermont at the local Hannaford along South Main Street. Joining us down at Hannaford today to help collect non-perishables, cash donations, sanitary products, etc. were Oliver Subaru in Rutland and Rutland Appliances. They are the two main sponsors for this leg of our Feed a Family event. Curtis VanEps, the General Manager for Oliver Subaru told us that fundraising events like this Feed a Family are the exact events their dealership loves to get involved with. The reason? It “feeds” back into Oliver Subaru’s mission of serving the community and helping out in anyway they can.

Robert Maguire of Rutland Appliances shared those same sentiments and added that Rutland Appliances are very excited to be first-time sponsors of this event. Robert noted that he and some of his employees were very excited to be presented with the opportunity to giveback and did just that by making some donations of their own.

Lastly, all of the donated items and cash donations will go directly to BROC Community Action. They are an organization that helps the underserved communities of Rutland and Bennington Counties. BROC has food shelves to help fight hunger locally but Tom Donahue, the Executive Director of BROC says that they also offer other resources and services when you have fallen on unfortunate times.

Again, all proceeds donated today will be getting used as early as tomorrow. The need is great in southern Vermont and we’re hoping you’ll make a donation of your own. We will be in Rutland at the local Hannaford until 7PM tonight. Stop by, say hello, and make a donation!

To say Wake Robin’s Red Tag Sale has grown by leaps and bounds over the 25-something years it’s been held is misleading. It has grown by monstrous vaults and gargantuan gambols.

It was promoted on social media as “one of the largest garage sales in Vermont.”

“One of”? It’s hard to imagine another garage sale that is even half as big. For one thing, the garage it is held in, under a building at Wake Robin, is massive, like Walmart massive.

And the line to get in went on for just short of forever. If you arrived 10 minutes before the 9 a.m. opening this past Saturday, you were parking at the guard booth, about half a mile away. (And by “you” I mean me.)

When I left after spending about an hour at the sale, cars were parked all the way to Bostwick Road and along that thoroughfare at least a quarter of a mile both east and west of the entrance to the senior living facility.

But people were still streaming in and finding a plethora of bargains remaining at the sale. There was an abundance of great deals on books, furniture, housewares, tools, china, glass, linens, jewelry, collectible, toys, games, baskets, lamps, art, electronics, sporting goods, frames, gardening stuff, bric-a-brac, holiday items and, believe it or not, more.

Sarah Meyers, one of coordinators of the sale, said the first year the Red Tag Sale was held the volunteers made $6,000. Although it was impossible to say how much they would make this year, last year they made $28,000, and this year was even bigger.

There were about 200 volunteers working on the sale, the other coordinator Judy Crouse said. Meyers said there were actually just 198 volunteers. (This newspaper appreciates accuracy.)

“We use the money in two ways. One is to pay for our activities for residents, and that’s about half of it. The other half is all the stuff that’s left over, that we give to charity,” Meyers said. “We also provide an outlet for less-fortunate families to come and shop.”

She said one sort of weird thing about the sale was “Barbie Bonanza,” tables filled with the pink figurines that have inspired years of play and a major hit movie. Someone had donated 200 Barbie dolls.

Ira White had come from Ferrisburgh. He’s an electrician and had a couple of extension cords draped over his arm he had scored at the sale.

John Hammer, formerly of Charlotte and now of Wake Robin (and emeritus member of this newspaper’s board) was working the art table where they had sold a painting by a well-known African artist for $200. It sold quickly, he said.

Suzi LaRonde of Shelburne had found a painting of the Charlotte Town Beach that she liked.

Alison Crouse, an independent filmmaker from Philadelphia, had come from Pennsylvania with a crew of seven, counting herself, to film a documentary about Wake Robin’s sale. So, she had two three-person film crews, each with a camera and, as the director, she was running from camera to camera, coordinating things. Except when she was interrupted by a nosy reporter.

Crouse and her crew had been coming to Wake Robin from Philadelphia monthly since October to film as donations were collected. Her mother Judy Crouse was the other coordinator of the sale, and Alison had heard about the sale from her parents, who are residents.

“I’m interested, not just in the event of the tag sale, but what it means, what kind of meaning we put in objects, what it means to own objects, what it means to love objects, what it means to buy objects, and do we think about: Who used to own them? And when did they become ours?” Alison Crouse said.

There were lots of objects becoming possessions for Crouse and crew to film. Over the months, they had been able to film people bringing objects to donate. They had been able to film those same objects as they were bought and became someone else’s objects on Saturday.

“It’s really interesting to see what people are attracted to,” Crouse said.

She expects to produce a 20-minute film, which could become longer if she finds grants after showing the initial version of the documentary.

Crouse said they started filming at 6:45 a.m. There were already people in line then.

She had interviewed a group of people that only know each other because of the tag sale. “They come every year, and they eat breakfast at the garage door,” Crouse said. “Every year, that’s how they know each other.”

Vermont’s alpine ski resorts had a pretty good year even though the weather this winter did not cooperate.

While the season’s snowfall total was actually 15 inches above the 10-year average, snowstorms were often followed by warm and rainy weather.

The number of visits to downhill resorts was down less than half-a-percentage-point from the prior season, according to data collected by the non-profit trade group, the Vermont Ski Areas Association.

At the same time, resort visits were down 6.6% in the Northeast and 6.2% nationally. A series of late-season snowstorms and, for resorts in the northern half of the state, the total solar eclipse, helped boost numbers.

“For Vermont to remain relatively flat is really remarkable,” said Molly Mahar, president of the Vermont Ski Areas Association. “And I think it’s directly attributable to their ability to provide those snow surfaces that keep people coming out even when Mother Nature maybe is a little stingy with the snow.”

It was a different story for the cross-country ski industry, however. More reliant on natural snowfall than the resorts, the state’s 26 ski touring centers reported 49.6% fewer visitors than the prior season.

According to the Vermont Climate Assessment, Vermont is getting warmer, wetter, and more variable—especially in winter. If the world does nothing to curb greenhouse gas emissions, it’s likely Vermont’s $1.6 billion ski industry will no longer be viable by 2080, due to a shortened season from lack of snow and cold temperatures.

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