Not all green is “green.” That’s the message from local land managers who are combating a host of non-native invasive plant species that menace locally preserved and reclaimed lands. 

Drew Diehl calls it “the Green Death.” Pervasive in many areas, a single non-native species of honeysuckle — Amur honeysuckle — has transformed the local landscape over the last 30 years.

This month’s poems come from longtime villager Rubin Battino, who has been writing three-line poems for decades. “We hit it off,” he said of the short form, his own adaptation of haiku.

A proposed 54-unit affordable senior housing rental project in Yellow Springs has not been funded — yet. Home, Inc. and its development partner, St. Mary Development Corporation, received word last week that they had not been awarded federal tax credits for the local senior apartment building, by far the largest project of its kind undertaken by Home, Inc.

Niche magazine publisher Ertel Publishing relocated to Xenia in March, after 30-plus years in the village. The company has been under new ownership since July 2017, when founder Patrick Ertel sold the business he started out of his Davis Street home to three employees: Brad Bowling, Jeremy Cundiff and Erin Puro.

UPS driver Rob Nangle is retiring at the end of May after 26 years on the Yellow Springs route. On a recent Friday, the News rode along to capture a few photos of the locally famous driver in action.

A consulting firm hired by Greene County has so far come up with four possible design options for a new local county jail complex.

When villager Don Hollister toured the Greene County Jail in downtown Xenia as part of a citizen group a year ago November, he was shocked by how stark it was. “My clearest impression looking at the barred cells was that it seemed out of a movie,” he said. “It fit every stereotype I had of an urban jail.”

Greene Canteen was a bright spot on a drizzly morning this past Saturday, April 20. The new eatery at 134 Dayton St. officially opened at 11 a.m., with a snip of a ribbon and a musical blast.

“There’s just no accounting for happiness,” begins a poem I love by Jane Kenyon. Happiness in this poem is a gift, a grace, as it seems to be in this month’s poem from musician Carl Schumacher.