THE WILLOW IN THE ATTIC

Dana Faralla lived in Minnesota in her childhood, and this, perhaps, supplies a background for her prairie setting, a prairie where the willow in a meadow was an important thing to the children in a house near by. There they had their tree house, there the butterflies laid their eggs. But lightning struck the tree; the meadow was sold; the tree had to go. So the children planted a branch in a nail keg, and put it up in the play village they had built in their attic. And at Christmas they decorated it with paper snowflakes; and at Easter with tissue leaves and eggshells. And in the Spring, the branch put out leaves once more- and the miracle of rebirth gave the children their own tree for their own yard. It is an imaginative, homely family story- with enough incident to carry along the mood of seasons and the human quality of a very real family.