The Little Ones of Willow Valley

The Door Beneath the Willow Tree

There was a valley that did not appear on any map. If you followed the old northern road beyond the last railway station, past the fields where barley grew tall in the summer and the stone walls became covered with moss, you would eventually reach a forest so old and dense that the road seemed to disappear beneath it. The trees grew close together there, their branches crossing overhead until the sunlight could barely find its way through. On rainy days, the road became a narrow ribbon of mud and silver puddles, and on misty mornings it was almost impossible to tell where the road ended and the forest began. Most travellers turned around long before they reached the other side. Those who continued, however, would eventually find themselves looking down into a quiet valley surrounded by green hills, dark woods and a long, winding lake that reflected the sky like a sheet of glass.

The people who lived there called it Willow Valley. Nobody could say exactly when the name had been given to the place. The oldest people in the village disagreed about it, although they all seemed strangely certain that the valley had been there long before any of their families. Some said it had been named after the enormous willow tree standing at the northern edge of the village, while others insisted that the tree had been named after the valley. There were even a few people who believed that neither explanation was correct. Whenever someone asked them where the name had really come from, they would smile in an almost secretive way and say that some things were better remembered by the land than by people.

Willow Valley was a peaceful place, at least most of the time. There was a small village beside the lake, with crooked houses painted in faded blues, greens and yellows, a bakery with blue shutters, a little post office that also sold fishing hooks and sewing thread, and an old stone bridge where people often stopped simply because the view was beautiful. In spring, the hills became covered with tiny flowers, and the meadows were filled with the sound of bees. Summer brought warm evenings when the villagers carried chairs outside and sat beneath the stars until the lamps in their windows became the only lights left. In autumn, the forest turned copper, gold and deep red, and leaves gathered along the roads until children could run through them without their feet touching the ground. Winter was quieter still. Snow covered the rooftops and froze the edges of the lake, and smoke curled from the chimneys while the villagers stayed indoors with hot tea, blankets and stories.

There were strange things in Willow Valley, too, although people rarely spoke about them unless they had known one another for a very long time. Sometimes, lights could be seen moving between the trees late at night when nobody was supposed to be in the forest. Sometimes, footprints appeared in the snow that seemed to belong to no animal anyone knew. Every now and then, someone would swear they had heard music coming from the lake on a night when the water was perfectly still. Nobody ever found where the music came from, and after a while the stories became part of the valley itself, like the old bridge or the church tower.

And then there was the willow tree.

It stood beyond the last houses, where the gardens ended and the open meadows began. Its trunk was so enormous that three grown people could barely reach around it while holding hands, and its long branches hung almost to the ground, creating a secret room beneath the leaves. The tree was older than the bakery, older than the bridge and perhaps older than the village itself. Nobody knew who had planted it. Nobody knew how it had survived so many storms. Nobody even knew how deep its roots reached beneath the earth.

Milo had always loved the tree.

He had spent countless afternoons beneath its branches, especially when he wanted to be alone. When he was younger, he had built little houses between the roots using pieces of wood, stones and fallen leaves. Later, when he learned to read properly, he discovered that the willow was the perfect place for books because the branches kept the sun out of his eyes while still allowing enough light through the leaves to see the pages. He had eaten apples there, fallen asleep there, hidden there when he did not want to help his grandmother in the garden, and once spent nearly an entire afternoon searching for a wooden toy boat he had dropped into the grass.