Dewey
The Small-Town Library Cat Who Touched the World
Chapter One
The Coldest
Morning
January 18, 1988, was a bitterly cold Iowa Monday. The night before, the
temperature had reached minus fifteen degrees, and that didn't take into account
the wind, which cut under your coat and squeezed your bones. It was a killing
freeze, the kind that made it almost painful to breathe. The problem with flat
land, as all of Iowa knows, is that there's nothing to stop the weather. It
blows out of Canada, across the Dakotas, and straight into town. The first
bridge in Spencer across the Little Sioux, built in the late 1800s, had to be
taken down because the river became so jammed with ice everyone worried the
pylons would collapse. When the town water tower burned down in 1893-the straw
packing us ... read full excerpt from Dewey ebook