The Mother by Pearl S. Buck

Through that day long the mother watched for the man to come home. It was a day when the fields could be left to their own growing, for the rice was planted in its pools, and in the shallow water and in the warm sunlight the green young plants waved their newly forming heads in the slight winds. There was no need to go out to the land that day.

So the mother sat under the willow tree spinning and the old woman came to sit beside her, glad of one to listen to what she said, and while she talked she unfastened her coat and stretched her thin old withered arms in the hot sun and felt the good heat in her bones, and the children ran naked in the sunshine too. But the mother sat silently on, twisting the spindle with a sure movement between her thumb and the finger she wet on her tongue, and the thread came out close spun and white, and when she had made a length of it she wound it about a bit of bamboo polished smooth to make a spool. She spun as she did all things, firmly and well, and the thread was strong and hard.