No surprise that we awoke to a lovely world of clean, white snow. The temperature is steadily rising, now at around 34 degrees, so most of the new snow will melt, but in the meantime, everything is coated with snow and it's beautiful. Slushy, but lovely.

Very early this morning, while it was snowing fairly heavily, Fred saw a partridge in our crab apple tree. By the time he had the camera, it had hopped down to feed on bits of apple under the tree. The squirrels and some smaller birds feed on these little apples left from last fall and scatter bits and pieces, and sometimes whole apples beneath the tree. We usually have one or two partridges come there to feed, and occasionally some turkeys will stop by, but we haven't seen any of those this year, although they probably came when we weren't watching.

We are following closely news of the earthquake and tsunami victims in Japan. It's hard to imagine anything so powerful and devastating. Until a few years ago, the only thing I knew about tsunamis was a little from high school science and what I'd seen in horror movies. Now it is a reality that's happening with increasing frequency, it seems.
This world can be a dangerous place, in so many ways, in spite of all the beauty and marvelous achievements.

When we saw Garey Larrabee at the post office yesterday, we talked about the many postmasters West Danville has had. The first was Andrew Strobridge, in 1858. He lasted six years, but some had the position for only two years. Jennie M. Hastings, Jane Larrabee's grandmother, held the position for 33 years, from 1914 until 1947, when her son, Ralph U. Hastings took over. Ralph held the position for 47 years and was the longest serving postmaster in the State of Vermont. He retired in 1994, when his son-in-law, Garey Larrabee became postmaster.

Did you know that in 1945 we could send first class mail for 3c and post cards were sent for 1c? Some of you are too young to remember that, I know. ZIP codes were introduced in 1963. I just looked up ZIP - it stands for Zoning Improvement Plan. Which led me to wonder about 9-1-1. The Emergency 9-1-1 program was initiated in 1968 in U. S., and 1972 in Canada. Along with that came the renumbering and in some cases, renaming of our roads and streets. In our area, some people still resist changing their long-time address, in spite of the danger that emergency crews would not be able to locate them if a fire or accident occurred. No lecture here, just stating a fact.

Back to my newsletter preparations. I've been contacting local businesses for ads in the newsletter - this helps defray the expense of printing and mailing. I'll have a few new advertisers in the newsletter this time, but if you want to have an ad, do get in touch with me right away. I want to have everything in place so it can go to the printer as soon as the ice is out - which doesn't look like it will happen any time soon, but I still recall last year's nail-biting last week of March when it seemed the flag could go down any time. That it held off until April 5th was a huge relief, but it broke the record of the contest's earliest ending date being April 16.