Spinning Pins

The woodstove in the center of a one-room schoolhouse is a spinning pin. When you are small it is behind you. Years pass, you erase your slate a thousand times, you are sitting next to the stove, more trudging and reciting, and finally you are the biggest sitting in the back row looking at the whole school: woodstove, rows of bent heads, maps on the walls between windows, and the teacher at the front. She is another pin. The schoolhouse is a book. The wind pushes on the walls.