Inside the front door the girls exchanged
the fragrance of early morning muskrat grass
for the sweet astringency of freshly cut  wood.
They stopped to watch two men,
nails in their teeth and brains, cobble raspberry flats,
side and bottom slats to grooved ends with shingle nails,
two hammer strokes per nail and taped fingers,
and then the crooning scream of the mill saw next door.

Below the loft to the right of the door
darkness stayed the whole day. Above the loft
light spilled through skylight windows
and wide cracks around them, and gathered flecks
of dust into lines that bent the loft's two-by-four
railing. Sandals clacking at the heels,
they mounted the ladder rungs
and held the second last one, looked up
as though to find a sunspot floating in the eye.
And then, at the top, their blouses caught
the light. They tied their hair up,
sat down straight-backed,
napes stretched, arms forward,
before chest high cast-iron staplers,
heads ready to bob like pianists.
Three percussive notes: dismissively
they flung the box into the cage below,
a pint box of two pieces
stapled and tossed in a single motion.

The young man who started work before the girls
and lowered his eyes when they climbed the ladder,
sometimes every second rung,
increased the pace of his two-handed jamming,
six boxes at a time--hullocks we called them-
twice into each flat. He stacked flats
with fresh hullocks shiny as sap,
soon to be spotted with red stains
of the first picking.

As summer came on, another stapler was hired.
Fingers and pedal feet grew more desperate.
When the girls' eyes met,
heads would stop bobbing,
and they nodded sidelong to each other,
laughing soundlessly, keeping their secrets
in the loft till the dark rose from beneath
to disconnect their machines. They climbed
the ladder down, their feet slightly spread.

If the guys with cars stood in the doorway
or stepped inside to watch the girls descend
one after the other, the girls looked
at each other, retied their hair,
and knew exactly where to step in the dark
to leave through another door
and walk together on the cedar sidewalk
of Yarrow Central Road, past vague shapes
of church and Co-op Store and school,
toward the coming season.

Always they had their work cut out for them,
one day fastened to the next in quick succession,
tossed down to be assembled in larger frames
 freshly numbered: love, double weddings
 under twin arches, still-births, many children,
parents sometimes senile, sometimes lucid
and wanting to die but saying so only to each other
and their daughters. Memories of hard work,
four-foot stapler machines accompanying
the imagined, and the cage
full to the top with boxes by nightfall;
in the morning thinking of what will be,
walking a mile and more down Central Road
on the moss-bordered wooden walk,
picking white Yarrow flowers, flinging them aside
like raspberry boxes before they reached the door.

They'd look up the ladder where staplers waited,
where shiny slats were turned into boxes
and shadows into wind and hair into leaves
shivering against stems
when morning seeps like cold canal water
through berry rows and grows large as the field.
And their sandalled feet
counted the steps of the ladder again.

by Leonard Neufeld

from Half in the Sun; anthology of Mennonite Writing.
Vancouver: Ronsdale, 2006