In his email, Duke Templeton says you could do whatever he wants to do anytime “in the old days,” but he does not say how old the days in question are. I consider my pile of books to see if any of the activities you cannot do in winter now you could do in winter years ago, but the only one that seems possible to me is the one about swimming laps. You cannot swim laps for fun and exercise now between Thanksgiving and March, but maybe there used to be an indoor pool and then you could. So that is what I must find out. Did Bourne use to have an indoor pool?
Bourne does not have a newspaper anymore because Bourne is too small a town to need one because nothing ever happens here, and when something does happen here everyone knows about it right away because we are such a small town. But there used to be the Herald Bourne, back when even small towns had newspapers, back before we were even alive. In the old days. Back then, there was no internet, so the Herald Bourne is not saved online, and it is also not archived on microform or microfiche like a real newspaper in a real library, but Mrs. Atholton, who was the librarian before Mrs. Watson, who was the librarian before me, saved some of the Herald Bourne’s articles by pasting them into scrapbooks and saved some of the scrapbooks by shelving them in the library as if they were actual books. Where they are now is in the pantry underneath the cereal.
I have looked in the scrapbooks but not a lot because the paper is old and the paste is old, so they are hard to read and delicate and crumble into powder if you touch them or even just sneeze too hard while you are looking （which you do because they are dusty）。 So I look carefully. There are a lot of scrapbooks, but I am not worried because I can skim the headlines to see if there is anything about an indoor pool or some other unlikely-to-exist-in-the-future winter activity.
What I learn is there was never anything to do in Bourne, not even in the old days.
In the winter of 1958, there was a snowman-building contest.
In the winter of 1959, there was a sled race on Baker Hill.
In 1961, there were record warm temperatures and therefore no snow and therefore no snowman-building contests or sled races.
For Christmas 1962, Bourners decorated a big tree in the middle of downtown. There was a contest for best handmade ornament. The winner was a tiny model of the space capsule Friendship 7 with an even tinier John Glenn in a tiny space suit inside.
There is no mention of an indoor pool.
In 1963, three Santas stood shoulder to shoulder to shoulder and dangled fishing poles over the river. The bridge was draped in holly and pine branches. At first I think this is an activity you used to be able to do in winter but cannot do in winter anymore. No one fishes in Bourne in winter now. No one fishes in Bourne at all now, but even before what happened happened, it was too cold to fish in winter, and the kind of fish that live in our river are sleeping or frozen or dead between Thanksgiving and March. However, the caption says the Santas were only pretending to fish which you could do any time of the year.
Then I look at the picture more closely.
It is black and white. Or, more accurately, brown and white. Or, more accurately, brown and beige because it is both faded and dirty, and not dirty in a way you can clean, though I do try, dirty like time got on it and now you cannot get it off.
But there is something very strange about this picture, and it is this: there is an extra river in it.
This cannot be.
But I check. And it cannot not be either.
And those are opposites.
The picture is fifty-five years old so it makes sense that some things would have changed between then and now, but you can see my library. You can see our very same church with its too-short, left-of-center door. You can see the bridge in between, arcing from one bank to the other. And if you look, you can see a river rushing below it.
Which is very, very wrong because there is no river there. The bridge with the river rushing under it is the bridge near the plant. The bridge between the church and the library, which is the bridge covered in Santas in this picture, is the bridge over the ravine.
I think about it for a long time, and here is what I think: Maybe there used to be many rivers in Bourne but most of them died or left or dried up, just like there used to be many people in Bourne but most of them died or left or dried up too. Maybe the river we know now is a twin of this old one, or maybe even there used to be more, triplet rivers, but the other ones did not survive. A lot of times when there is more than one baby in one womb only one of them lives long enough to be born, and even though I do not like to think about it, it is true anyway.
But this Santa river did not die in the womb. It lived for at least a while. Because here it is, alive and well, in 1963, but now, fifty-five years later, it is nowhere to be seen.