I went to a fancy college back east and one of my many peculiar jobs was to water the plants in Hilles Library. Every week I took a huge watering can out of the maintenance closet, filled it with water from a big slate sink that smelled of disinfectant, and lugged it from floor to floor, refilling three times as I went.

The library was a four-storey glass affair built in the early '70s, and most of the plants I watered were on the middle landings of the staircases, between the floors. On Thursday nights you could stand outside and watch me do the whole routine — I know this because it's how my boyfriend got up his nerve to introduce himself. The plants were ficus trees, of course, those tropical imports that someone decided should grace every public building in America. They're beautiful and lacy, and when placed beside plate glass walls on the south side of a library, need to be watered more than once a week.

I knew nothing about plants at this time, and couldn't figure out whether the yellow leaves that dropped from these two south-side trees were a sign of too much water or too little. I was nervous that I was killing them, but my boss was a gruff maintenance supervisor who was hard to find. I didn't know who else to ask, and didn't want to admit to failure.

As I was weighing my options, dreading the autumnal pile of leaves I would find under these trees, they began to recover. Each week I picked up fewer dead leaves and the ones still on the branches looked happier. It was very mysterious, until the night I went with my boyfriend to study for a final and met one of the librarians with a watering can on the stairs. She smiled, a little guiltily. I smiled back, gratefully. There's more than one way a librarian can save you.

Hilles Library was a fine place to go with your boyfriend if you were really going to study. Those glass walls made it hard to do anything else. If you had other things in mind, you went to Widener, the enormous main college library, and went into the stacks. My major was Folklore & Mythology, an excellent choice because that section was to be found on level C, two floors underground. No one was ever down there except me. I spent some of my happiest college hours on the musty carpet of level C, engaged in an ancient and popular practice — although of course we thought we'd invented it — sandwiched between Mircea Eliade's The Sacred and the Profane and the Fitzgerald translation of Homer's Iliad.

If you have a story about a library — any library — or any librarian, whether she or he saved you or not, we want to consider it for our anthology, Open to All. We is me, Molly Fisk, Steve Fjeldsted, the county librarian, and Steve Sanfield, reknowned poet and storyteller. The deadline is May 15th, so you'll have to move fast. The limit is 750 words. E-mail it to us or just take it into any Nevada County library. The address is opentoall@co.nevada.ca.us. That's opentoall@co.nevada.ca.us. We thank you.