The Mother by Pearl S. Buck

She did not see the man again through the whole spring, although she remembered him. She did not see him until a day in the early summer, when the wheat was turning faintly gold, and she had sown her rice in beds for seedlings, and it was sprouted new and green and set in small blocks of jade near the house where it could be well watched by the old grandmother against the greedy birds that loved its tenderness. And all this time her heart lay in her hot and fallow.

But there came a day in that early summer, a day windless and full of soft new heat. The cicadas called their sharp loves and when they had called past the crisis their voices trailed slow and languorous into silence again. Into the valley the sun poured down its heat like clear warm wine and the smooth warm stones of the solitary street of the little hamlet threw back the heat again so that the air shimmered and danced above them, and through those waves the little naked children ran and played, their smooth bodies shining with their sweat.