Renewal 8 - War Council Read Online Free PDF Page A

would not be a problem. Glass was a possibility. There were bound to be hundreds of empty houses with windows that could be salvaged and re-tasked to greenhouse duty, but the amount of effort involved meant that we would miss the incredibly short growing season.
    We had brought a dozen rolls of clear plastic from one of our salvage trips, and they would work well enough, but Dad was worried that they sheeting would freeze and crumble before we harvested the cool weather crops we had in mind. Back to the building supply they went, Arturo and Kirk and Dad. They came back two hours later with the station wagon grinding under a stack of ribbed polycarbonate panels lashed to the roof. They had seen several people, they reported, but no one had bothered them.
    The greenhouse frame was built from well-seasoned lumber. Most of it had been drying for decades. Dad tried to select only softwoods to avoid the problem of driving nails into something like oak. They commandeered four of Sally’s raised garden beds and used them as the base for the structure. The logic was that the soil in the beds would warm from the sun faster than the soil in the ground, and then would serve to release heat for a while after the sun went down. When the frame was complete, we laboriously screwed the poly panels on the outside of the framework, and Dad found a staple gun to line the inside of the frame with the flexible plastic rolls. By using the double layers, he explained that we would generate two climate zones more heat inside than out in the open. When the first greenhouse passed Dad’s engineering standards, we did the whole thing again with the next four garden beds. Three days of work later, we had almost 2000 square feet under clear plastic.
    Of course, Dad wasn’t done yet. He used a set of rusty eye hooks and steel reinforcing rod to rope both greenhouses to the ground. He was anticipating months of wind. Then, with some more rummaging, he found a bunch of the same kind of water barrels that Mr. Carroll had given us. Dad painted them black, filled them with water, and attached a maze of old PVC pipe to the fittings on the barrels. In a bizarre moment, he asked Kirk to suck water through the pipes until the whole system was charged with water. Kirk looked like his head would implode before the water finally trickled through. The final touch was to paint the PVC black to match the barrels. Dad seemed proud of his homemade heat exchanger and expected it to make a real difference when the weather turned cold.
    The daytime highs were creeping up into the fifties in late July. Thanks to the raised beds and dark colors in Sally’s domain, the clearing was nearly free of winter snow by then, while out in the larger territory, the north slopes and heavy wooded areas still held masses of snow. Dad could be seen several times every day, watching the sky anxiously. We were approaching the time when, the year before, the weather had changed rapidly, freezing the great state of Tennessee solid for ten eternal months. Would it be just as bad again? We had no way to know, and no one to tell us.
    Once the major upgrades were complete, Dad went into what he called mad chipmunk mode. He and Arturo went out every day in search of anything that could be helpful. The  empty spaces in Sally’s numerous outbuildings rapidly filled with supplies and random junk. I’m not sure they had anything specific in mind. Maybe it was just a way to deal with the unknown.
    While they were out on salvages trips with Kirk; Mom, Lucy, Tommy, Jimmy, Sally and I were left with the daily farm chores. Sally had taken a special interest in Lucy, teaching her the skills of farming in much more detail than the rest of us. We were taught the tasks and put to work. Lucy was learning the how’s and why’s of everything around us. Being raised in the pre-Breakdown world, it was easy to dismiss the youngest in our group, but they were good workers, given the right tasks. Sally explained