Hello, it's me, Lily, a frog who lives in a pond and loves to tell stories.

Happy springtime listeners this winter. I spent so much of my time at a

frog university where I lecture on croaking and calling for the faculty of seasonal adaptation,

camouflage, and metamorphosis. And I love being there, but I've missed you. Well, I have a new

story for you. An original story for Tales from the Lily Pad by Marlene Werfel about a little

meadow mouse who, like all meadow mice, keeps busy, busy foraging, busy tunneling,

busy nesting, busy storing food. And even though he looks a lot like the other meadow mice,

quick and no bigger than a walnut, and the same color as one, but with a pink nose and pink ears

and a spark of curiosity in his black eyes, you can tell him apart from the other meadow mice

because he wears a tiny wizard's cape and a pointy wizard's hat and carries a tiny twig that he calls

his wand. His mother named him Poof, but he insists on being called a zyvorn cornebius Maxaro

the Brown, which is his preferred name. He lives with his parents and sisters and brothers in a burrow under a mossy log.

The mossy log is quite far from his wizard school,

so he has to scurry through many tunnels to get there.

He passes several villages of mice on his way.

He scurries under leaves on the forest floor and alongside fallen logs and the cool mossy corridors just beneath where the log curves away from the ground.

It's safe and cool there and smells of mushrooms.

When he leaves the woods and enters the meadow, he sticks to

tunnels under the grass. He can smell the soil and the roots poking down into the earth, and he knows

the rest of the world can't see him there. His favorite thing to find when he reaches the meadow

is a wild strawberry. His least favorite thing is find when he reaches the meadow is a wild strawberry.

His least favorite thing is to hear the cry of a hawk and to feel its shadow passing over him.

...