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I had thought of it, I had gone through and taken what I felt would be most valuable to us. Then I had fastened all the windows securely, checked all the outside doors, and made a sign, which I taped inside the glass of the front door:
    The key is in the letterbox. Please use this library as you need it, but do close it tightly when you are through, so that the weather will not harm the books. This will be the way to the future for our children.
    Maybe nobody would ever read the sign or use the place, but I felt better for it. Of course, the college had a fantastic library, there on the parklike campus. It was one of those windowless monstrosities that they built at the height of air-conditioner worship, and it was inhabited by someone who spoke only through the barrel of a high-powered ride.
    Though we tried to speak to him/her, there was never any answer, even to offers of help and food. Whether it was a fanatical custodian or a crazed librarian we will never know. Perhaps, even after all this time, that grim guardian still stands off nonexistent book pilferers. By the time the children need what is there, old age should have solved the problem.
    (When we were sitting around the heater one night, wondering what the library guard ate, Sukie solemnly suggested that he/she likely subsisted on the offspring of the bats in his own belfry. Then we sat around debating whether that, in this case, might not be called cannibalism.)
    Of course, there was much that needed to be done that couldn't be tackled in the winter. Even with the small store of antibiotics that we had been able to winkle out of the drugstores' debris, we feared pneumonia. Without available doctors, hospitals, and stores of fresh penicillin, it would, we felt sure, revert to its old status of killer. So we didn't spend long hours in the cold and wet.
    That left long winter days for talking and reading and writing. The talented among us took up whittling, and we soon had a store of bowls and spoons, hairpins and knitting needles, figures of man, beast, and what's-it. Aunt Lantana often walked the damp way over to spend the day with us, and she proved to be a genius with a knife.
    I see that I've not described Lantana, and she well deserves description. She was, by her own calculations, somewhere approaching eighty. She was the color of warm copper, a result of her Indian admixture of blood. Tall and strong, even yet, she had the dignity of a pagan queen. And she knew everything there was to know about the plants native to the area, plus a great deal about medicinal herbs that had been brought in by early settlers or used by her Indian ancestors.
    Under her direction, we gathered willow bark for tea (the original aspirin). We saved the husks from the black walnuts that we gathered from the woods far making dye later. We even garnered some of the big acorns, so that she could show us how to leach away their bitter taste and make meal from them.
    "When you gets to my age," she said, "you can't tell for sho ' how long you're goin ' to be around. Now you need to know what I can teach you, and we'll do it just as if I won't be here another year."
    So we went with her through the winter wood, learning to identify even the leafless bushes and trees, making lists of their uses. She showed us where the dry stalks of cattail rustled at the edges of the river shallows. "Every part of the cattail is good," she told us. "You can eat the root, boil the young 'tail' like sweet corn, catch the pollen for flour, eat the young green shoots. And make baskets from the fibrous green leaves."
    Where we went with Aunt Lantana became magical, for she could see the nub that would grow into next year's poke sallet . She knew where the lamb's quarters would grow next summer. She could gather the resiny wads of sweetgum from a scarred tree and chew it up with stretchberries to make real bubblegum. All of us, young and old, went about with sticky teeth for days after that lesson.
    Most of all,