The room in the middle had dormer windows that gave enough light for sewing. Here Judy had placed her sewing machine. Opposite it was a large chest of drawers, a chair, and a bookcase filled with things she treasured.
In one of the other rooms her grandmother’s things were stored. Judy had never got around to sorting all of them.
In the third room were things she had saved herself. The wall was lined with books she had loved and didn’t want to part with. She had taken them all to her grandmother’s house the summer before the flood. Her old dolls were there too.
It was in this room that Judy found what she was looking for—a stack of old magazines.
“It must be in this pile here somewhere,” she told Peter, rapidly going through the stack. “It was an article in an old issue of Life, and it had lots of pictures in color of Hindu gods and goddesses. I’ll know it by its cover—a Hindu girl with some kind of an ornament on her forehead. Do you remember it, Peter?”
“I believe I do,” he replied. “There were pictures of gods and goddesses on a big fold-out page. Some of them were in the Riker collection. They were hardly what you’d call dolls, although some of them were green. To the more educated Hindus they have become symbolic.”
“You mean like our sandman?” asked Judy with a yawn.
Peter laughed. “I never thought of it that way, but I guess the sandman is a symbol of sleep, and you and I could use some of it. We can look through the rest of these old magazines another time.”
“It’s no use. It isn’t here. We’d better go down.”
Judy picked up Buttercup, her favorite doll. “I’m going to tuck her in bed with Penny,” she told Peter, “so she’ll find her when she wakes up.”