Spinning Pins

The weaver trods over goldenrod and grass to the cherry tree, which decorates itself with fetching groups of fruits, each harboring a stone. She intends to fill a quart basket and eyes a low series of branches, easy with their jewels. She will trot them back to the studio and divert the painter with their shades of coral and crimson.

He is beginning now to map out scenes on a spare piece of wood, practicing for the first strokes on the wall of the dining room itself. Standing to look, he squints, tries to enter his own lines, taps his fingers on his thigh.

The women in the harvest scene are bent, dragging sacks of cotton at greater angles than their own backs and the heavy white bags like fish leaning right in one row and left in the next row, so much fuller and brighter than the women that the eye sees the cotton as the bodies and loses the people themselves. A horse pulls a wagon with three wheels askew, full of cotton, uphill.

Each figure is alone—the woman with the camera, the man riding sidesaddle, the woman large as trees, each of four workers, each row of corn. The washerwomen and laundry line grope in an ocean of green, suit, bloomers, two sheets, a baby’s garment…

He looks out the window, where the weaver is visible under the mimosa trees, holding a basket of red and pulling in deeply the trees’ ecstatic smell.