Barbara Cooney

As a child Great-aunt Alice Rumphius resolved that when she grew up she would go to faraway places, live by the sea in her old age, and do something to make the world more beautiful--and she does all those things, the last being the most difficult of all.

After hearing some men call his father and him hillbillies on his first trip into the nearby town of Hudson, a young boy is not so sure he still wants to become a basket maker.

A poem telling of the birth of a child in a barn among the animals, with illustrations which depict the barn and people of a twentieth-century farm.