How did I feel about retiring? Going by what I wrote at the time.

I put it in writing on Friday. The letter to the district is two sentences long and took me most of an evening.

Reading "News of the World." An old man goes from town to town in Texas reading the newspapers aloud for a dime, and is handed a child to take home who does not want to go. It is as plain as a fence post and I could not put it down.

Ninety-three school days left. A second-grader worked it out for me on the whiteboard, unasked.

They gave me a party after school, in the library, with the tables pushed back. I had asked for none.

Patricia spoke. She said that in thirteen years she had never once found the library locked when the bell rang, and that I had taught a generation of children to say "May I renew this?" Lorraine spoke after her and told the story of the 1994 conference and the hotel fire alarm, which I had asked her not to.

Then a young woman I did not at first know stepped up with a flat parcel. Daniela Voss. She was in my library from kindergarten through fifth grade, a child who drew on everything, and she is at art school in Milwaukee now. It is a pencil portrait of me at the circulation desk, done from an old yearbook photograph and from memory: I am looking over my glasses at someone just outside the frame who is about to be told to walk.

R. has already decided where it will hang. One week left.

Last day. Thirty-one years at Tamarack Hill, and before that, before the children, the children's room of the public library in La Crosse. It is the only work I have ever done.

I got there at 6:50, as always, and unlocked. Lenny Stroik had left a single yellow rose in a coffee can on the desk, with no card.

No classes on the last day. The children come through by rooms to say goodbye to their teachers and this year, it turned out, to me. Mrs. Kowalski's third grade brought a paper chain with a link for each of them and what they liked best. "The shark books" leads, followed by "when you do the voices" and, from a boy named Emmett, "that you let me stay in at recess when it was bad."

At 11:15 the fifth grade came through on their way out of the building for good. I looked for Malik among them, and of course he is in high school by now.

At noon the buses went. I have always liked that sound, the diesels all starting at once.

Then it was only the room. I did the inventory last week: 12,046 volumes, 17 missing, a personal best. I ran my hand along the 590s. I logged out of the circulation system and it asked me whether I was sure.

I climbed up into the reading loft, which I have not done in ten years. Lenny built it in 1998 from a drawing I made on a napkin in the staff room. There are names written in pencil on the underside of the rail, where no adult would look, going back to the first year, and I read them all, lying on my back in my good skirt. I knew about two-thirds of them. Then I had some trouble getting down.

I turned in my keys to Bunny in the office at 2:40. There are four: the building, the library, the workroom, the cabinet. The library key has been on my ring since August 1986 and has worn a groove in the others. She put them in an envelope and wrote OSTRANDER on it, and I thought, well, that is that, and was fine, and walked out to the car and could not get the car key into the ignition because of my hands.

I did not cry at the party. I cried in the parking lot of an elementary school, in a Honda, at a quarter to three on a Friday afternoon, for about four minutes. Then I blew my nose and drove to Paper Birch and bought three novels at full price.

R. had supper made: walleye from the freezer, and a rhubarb pie from the bakery that he is not supposed to eat, and ate. He did not ask how it was. He said, "You're home early," and I said, "I'm home," and he nodded.

It does not feel like anything yet. It feels like a Friday.

The first Monday. At 7:45, when the first bell rings, I was standing in my own kitchen holding a dish towel.

R. came in from the shop at ten for coffee and found me reading at the table in daylight. He looked at me over his glasses and said, "Now you know."

Otherwise I have walked Gus around the loop, slowly, at his pace; put the spices back in alphabetical order; telephoned Lorraine, who laughed at me for a full minute; and started "Olive Kitteridge" over again, which the club read in 2011 and I read too fast. Olive is a retired teacher, large, rude, and right about most things.

At 10:40 this morning I looked up from the page. That is when the first-grade bell rings. I have been listening for bells all week, like a horse that still stops at the houses on the milk route. Nobody has asked me for anything since Wednesday. I had thought I would like that more.

Rain since Sunday. R. is tying leaders at the table, and I have read "Olive Kitteridge" to the end and gone straight on into "Anything Is Possible," the same author, a different town.

We came home Thursday to cut the grass and see to the mail, and this morning I went to Stitchery Lane and bought a sewing machine: a Bernina, the quilter's model. It cost more than my first car. I wrote the check without my hand shaking, because I have been putting the money by since the day I decided.

It is my retirement present to myself. Six free classes come with it. I have pieced thirty-odd quilts on the old Kenmore.

R. carried it up and asked where the table saw of sewing machines would like to sit. It goes in the upstairs back bedroom.

The last paycheck from the district came on the 15th, and the first pension payment is promised for the 1st. Between the two I have done the arithmetic four times, on paper, and R. has done it once in his head and got the same answer: it is enough. With his, and with what Tom Kittleson looks after, it is rather more than enough.

I know that. I still stood in Fenner's this morning comparing the price of two kinds of butter, for some time.

First day of school. I am at the cabin, and at 7:45 this morning I was on the dock in a sweater with my coffee, with mist coming off the lake and one loon, the young one, alone now that the parents have gone.

Thirty-one Septembers running I have unlocked that library on this morning. I had expected to mind. What I felt, when the hour came, was the absence of a weight I had stopped noticing, the way you notice a refrigerator when it shuts off. Megan will have been unlocking the door.

Then at ten o'clock I did mind, for about half an hour, rather badly, and went and washed the boathouse windows, which did not need it.

Lorraine telephoned at noon to ask how it was. I said: both. She said that is the right answer.