By Theodora Quimby, Weather and Announcements Correspondent

GRANGER FLATS — When the first flakes of the season fell over Maple Bend Community Church last Tuesday, a laminated chart taped inside a kitchen cabinet sprang to life, just as it has every snowy morning since the winter of 1994.

The chart is the church's snow-day phone tree. It was drawn by hand on graph paper, photocopied, laminated and never updated. Of the nine people listed as branch captains, two still live in the county, one has a fax machine and one is a golden retriever, a mix-up nobody has ever gotten to the bottom of.

And yet the system works. On Tuesday, all 112 households on the list knew services and the women's breakfast were canceled by 6:15 a.m. Church leaders credit one person: Dolores Venning, 81, who has quietly become the trunk, the branches and most of the leaves.

"It just sort of drifted my way," Venning said from her kitchen, where a rotary phone and a cordless phone sit side by side like coworkers who don't get along. "When Branch Three moved to Florida in 2006, she started calling me instead of her list. Then Branch Five got a cellphone and lost my number, so I started calling her. After a while, it was easier to just call everybody."

Venning keeps the master list in a spiral notebook held together with a rubber band and what appears to be a pancake-supper raffle ticket. Each household has a note beside it, such as "lets it ring 9 times," "husband answers, ask for Barb" and "do NOT mention the casserole dish."

The church council has tried to modernize. In 2015 it bought a group texting service. The first message, about an ice storm, went to a dentist's office in Nebraska. In 2019 it set up an email list, which so far has announced one closing, three days late.

"We showed Dolores the app," said council secretary Marcus Oduya-Fenn, 46. "She watched politely, handed the phone back and asked if we wanted her to just call everyone. We said yes. That has been our whole technology plan ever since."

The tree has one known flaw. Every call ends up at the house of Harlan Pruett, 77, listed in 1994 as "last call, confirms back to top." Pruett still does his job faithfully, phoning Venning to report that the tree is complete. Since Venning is the one who called him, she has, in a sense, been confirming with herself for twenty years.

"It's important to close the loop," Pruett said. "Otherwise how would anyone know it worked?"

Younger members have offered to share the load. Venning has agreed to train a backup, 29-year-old Kendra Haskell, on the condition that Haskell learn to let a phone ring nine times without hanging up. Haskell is on day four of practice and has made it to seven.

At press time, the council had voted to update the laminated chart for the first time in 32 years. The new version has one branch. It reads "Dolores," with a small arrow pointing to "Harlan," and a second arrow pointing back.