The painter and the weaver are unmoored, whales in a blank ocean of sod, pins themselves to hawks or the sun. They cast shadows that ripple on the seedheads, towers broadcasting dark on what will broadcast new grasses.

The painter traces a long arc as he walks, impatiently, a little in front of the weaver. She watches the hair riffle on the back of his head. She thinks of writing to her sister. A truck's loud brakes, half a mile away, carry over the windbreaks. The sun washes through her view, too abundant to see.

They come to the edge of the field and enter the province of a spreading oak with near-horizontal branches seven feet off the ground. It is a world. The ground underneath is cool and springy. From here the field is a field, not a sea, and the place to lie down is obvious.

It was months ago that the two trees announced their eerie similarity, one an echo of the other's shape.


Now that the leaves are out, it becomes clear that despite the correspondence, they are of different species.

Synonym for small:

thin as six o'clock.

The weaver sweeps and makes coffee. This is filling a pot with hot water for coffee, cold water for cleaning, hot water for coffee, cold water for cleaning. She walks to the cupboard for grounds, to the sink for water, cupboard, sink.

The painter brings a white cup and sets it on the step. He lays his tools and brushes along the table. The master wants a mural that will gather up the acres and roll them out again along the wall, ponds and horses suspended in summer or late spring, but the painter can only see tiny things--the nub of a peony shattered by a heavy rain, four brown eggs on a brown plate carried by the weaver's younger sister. He stares for a long time, without seeing. Ash on the stones.

When the weaver is standing at the sink, he presses his hand into the small of her back and says, "Come walk with me."

She puts down the coffeepot and they look left and right as they leave, guilty.

Into the barnyard and through it quickly, not walking close, until they come into the woodlot and toward each other, bending to examine a grotesque rubbery fungus like some alien brimmed hat attached to a stump, then out again into the lonely hayfield, usually private seedheads swaying, a bunting at the edge, brilliant blue on a low branch.

Housewarming:

We met a neighbor for the first time and he greeted us with the news that he once killed a copperhead on our kitchen table.

Is his voice the one I've heard yelling many times, or once, laughing loudly?

Suddenly last fall I noticed a break in the privet hedge fronting the road. Old stone steps down the bank. An overgrown entrance, directly in line with our house's front door.



Once remarked upon, this opening in a formerly solid wall seemed to enlarge.

"From Baton Rouge to New Orleans, the great sugar-plantations border both sides of the river all the way, and stretch their league-wide levels back to the dim forest walls of bearded cypress in the rear. Shores lonely no longer. Plenty of dwellings all the way, on both banks—standing so close together, for long distances,

that the broad river lying between the two becomes a sort of spacious street. A most homelike and happy-looking region.


And now and then you see a pillared and porticoed great manor-house, embowered in trees."

~Mark Twain~

We've been meaning to start marking where the sun rises.

The chimney pins the house down and opens it to the weather. It is a vertical edifice, slim or hipped, reaching through the center of the house or anchoring an edge. Through the chimney the house exhales, a workaday dragon. The chimney is a pin in the time of a particular house, foundation-steady while wingchairs and family members come and go around it. And it pins all houses--the original center of the hearth, commonly punching through human roofs. (Needs for food and heat link years and far-flung persons; gods or clocks have occupied the mantle.)

In its belly are the ministrations of housekeeping--fire-tending and, therefore, stews bubbling and water boiling and hands rubbing--and up through its lengthy, unseen interior chamber travel the atmospherics of the human domestic, byproducts of common necessity, daily emissions. Our breakfasts and teas and lye: their usefulness fills the volume of our houses but their ethereal and material signatures rise, billow, escape and rejoin the clear air above. So chimneys link the solid bottom of the hearth--the flat, sooty site of utility and economy--with what is most inaccessible and intangible--the sky.

And when the painter and the weaver, after the first hailstorm of summer, lean to listen at the opening of the fireplace, they hear the white noise of the flooded creek, muted but distinctive, carried down the chimney to their ears.

According to an expert, the chimney may be used to let someone know you are coming, before you round the bend:


"And the boat is rather a handsome sight, too. She is long and sharp and trim and pretty; she has two tall, fancy-topped chimneys, with a gilded device of some kind swung between them; a fanciful pilot-house, all glass and "gingerbread," perched on top of the "texas" deck behind them; the paddle-boxes are gorgeous with a picture or with gilded rays above the boat's name; the boiler-deck, the hurricane-deck, and the texas deck are fenced and ornamented with clean white railings; there is a flag gallantly flying from the jack-staff; the furnace doors are open and the fires glaring bravely; the upper decks are black with passengers; the captain stands by the big bell, calm, imposing, the envy of all;


great volumes of the blackest smoke are rolling and tumbling out of the chimneys--a husbanded grandeur created with a bit of pitch-pine just before arriving at a town;


the crew are arriving on the forecastle; the broad stage is run far out over the port bow, and an envied deck-hand stands picturesquely on the end of it with a coil of rope in his hand; the pent steam is screaming through the gauge-cocks; the captain lifts his hand, a bell rings, the wheels stop; then they turn back, churning the water to foam, and the steamer is at rest."

Shade is reliable, like fire.

"These brooms are able to stand freely on their cut ends:"

She is always sweeping, bricks and chestnut.

Given charge over all the family's floors, she wears through three brooms a year, up and down all the breezy hallways, back and forth across parlors and bedrooms, and three times a day in front of the doors, where friends of the master come in for beer and goose or the gardener minces in red-clay boots, yelling for water. And when she comes back into the fold of her own little chamber at night, she has an old broom in the corner that she methodically draws along the flagstones before she puts on her nightgown.

A peculiar sidestep, left foot joined by right--in this way she walks every inch of house, outbuildings, summer kitchen.

The artist watches her, imitates the little dance in front of his window, begins to think of his mural, stirs a cup of wine by agitating it in his hand.

Trees are spinning pins.



But they are landmarks that move all year.

We enter, live and suffer within, ignorant of pounded nails and layered images within each day-dark wall and corner. oh! is it not rich in comfort & hope to you

--Your stranger-friend,
the house.