Barren Ground by Ellen Glasgow

The faint grey light crept through the dormer-window and glimmered with a diffused wanness over the small three-cornered room. Turning restlessly, Dorinda listened, half awake, to the sound of her mother moving about in the kitchen below. A cock in the henhouse crowed and was answered by another. "It isn't day," she thought, and opening her eyes, she gazed through the window at the big pine on the hill. The sun rose over the pine; every morning she watched the twisted black boughs, shaped like a harp, emerge from obscurity. First the vague ripple of dawn, spreading in circles as if a stone had been cast into the darkness; then a pearly glimmer in which objects borrowed exaggerated dimensions; then a blade of light cutting sharply through the pine to the old pear orchard, where the trees still blossomed profusely in spring, though they bore only small green pears out of season. After the edge of brightness, the round red sun would ride up into the heavens and the day would begin.

It was seldom that she saw the sunrise from her window. Usually, unless she overslept herself and her mother got breakfast without waking her, the men were in the fields and the two women were attending to the chickens or cleaning the house before the branches of the big pine were gilded with light.