Spinning Pins

On the first day of summer the weaver takes her loom down from the ceiling in a very early dawn and sets up for the deepest red fabric. It is a color one might call bull's blood, or airplane.

This is to be the largest acreage she has made, and on the longest day of the year. When it's finished she will cut lengthy swags to hang on either side of a yawning fireplace and the sun will suspend a ribbon of light from the lip of the view. A pot of tea steams lightly on the table; she's wakeful and charged.

An hour into the weaving, she moves like a nesting bird back and forth, a chugging and delicate rhythm, hands and syncopated legs. The only variation is to glance at odd intervals out the window, the shadows crawling and getting crisper along the fence.

In his makeshift studio, meanwhile, the painter runs a pencil over what he has rendered as a summer funeral on a scrap of paper: the cheerful preacher, the heap of sod and the knot of black where mourners are singing a hymn. If this were part of the mural, he wonders, who would the weaver assume was meant to have died?