Spinning Pins

"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.