MISQUAH — Ruth Aune, the children’s librarian who has shaped the reading lives of Misquah’s young people for more than two decades, was flown to Abbott Northwestern Hospital in Minneapolis over the Fourth of July weekend after a medical emergency, and is, her family reports, resting, stable, and expected to recover.

Mrs. Aune was taken ill on Saturday, during the holiday, and transported to the Cities for care the regional hospital in Pinedale was not equipped to provide. Her family declined to detail the nature of the emergency, asking only that the community know she is “in good hands, getting stronger, and already complaining about the food, which is the best sign there is.” Cards may be sent to the library, which will see that she gets every one.

The town’s concern has been considerable and, in the manner of the place, intensely practical: the church prayer chains activated within the hour, a meal schedule materialized for her husband by Sunday, and the library’s front desk has fielded a steady stream of patrons asking, in various words, the same anxious question. “People don’t quite know what to do with worry around here,” said one Ladies’ Aid member, “so they make a casserole and they ask after the books. Both of those are love. She’d know them as love.”

The most pressing practical question was the summer reading program, which Mrs. Aune runs single-handedly and which is at its high-water mark, with some forty children mid-climb through her hand-built tiers of animals. Into that gap has stepped Megan Tollefson, the incoming Oakview elementary teacher — and, this newspaper notes with its customary transparency, the niece of its editor, which is the kind of thing that happens in a town that has one of most things and two of almost nothing.

Miss Tollefson inherited the program mid-stride, including its most formidable participant: Brynn Solberg, who had “cleared the wolves” under Mrs. Aune and now stands poised against a tier above eagles that does not yet exist. “Ruth left big shoes and one very tricky reader,” Tollefson said. “I’m not going to reinvent the whole system in a week. I’m going to keep the books moving and keep the chair warm and keep that child supplied. That’s the job until Ruth’s back — and she’s coming back.”

Mrs. Aune, reached briefly through her family, asked the paper to relay a single instruction to her readers, which it prints here in full: “Pace yourselves. The summer is long. I will be checking.”