Eddie Hawkins, age 8, of Channelview, Texas, for his question:

Where does cinnamon come from?

Nothing tastes better than a juicy apple pie    except an apple pie cooked with a sprinkling of rusty brown cinnamon. We get most of our spicy cinnamon from the island of Ceylon, which is out in the ocean near the tip of India. There the warm moist tropical weather is just right for growing the cinnamon laurel. This very special tree has huge, flat evergreen leaves, tiny yellow blossoms aad fruits that look somewhat like acorns. When left to itself, it grows 30 feet tall. But a tree this size does not give much spicy cinnamon.

The best cinnamon spice is in and under the bark of the young twigs. So every year the big branches are cut off and the cinnamon tree sprouts lots of young twigs. During the summer, people peel the bark from these slim twigs and leave it to dry in the sun. As it dries the sweet smelling bark curls up and turns a pale brown color. This is the spicy stuff we call cinnamon. Some of the dry bark is mashed to powder. Some is left in tight rolls and sold as cinnamon sticks.