The Weaver Who Clad The Summer
by Harris Merton LyonGenre: Myth
Setting: Fantasy
Format of Original Source: Short Story
Recommended Adaptation Length: 45 Minutes
Candidate for Adaptation? Promising
EXCERPT:
And there, on the grass, sure enough, was a little naked baby girl just able to stand.
Very quiet, she was, and she looked up at Andy with eyes of a fairy blue–as if they’d been colored by that very same fairy that goes about with a brush coloring all the violets we ever see. (The ones we never see, you know, are never colored.)
“We-e-ell!” cried Andy, puckering up his lips and squinting up his eye-lids. “And who are you?”
“I’m early Summer,” she lisped. “And I’m in a dreadful hurry. I’d like some lemon-colored silk–for a mantle, you know?–And some apple-green tassels for my hair. And please do be quick about it. I’m due, you see. So I’ll be ever so much obliged if you’ll only hurry.”
Andy whistled ruefully. “Now, that would take some weaving, miss.” He hesitated. “I don’t think I’m that skillful.”
The little goddess looked hurriedly away over her shoulder as if she were about to depart.
“And then,” Andy continued, “I have no loom up here; and no warp; and no filling. Nothing at all to work with, you see. I–“
But while he was stumbling about with his excuses, he saw the little one actually fading away before his eyes; and a pain most bitter caught at his heart, as if he were losing all his life. So he cried out:
“But I’ll try miss. Give me a little time, miss. Oh, please, my wee bairn. I have an old handloom of my grandfather’s; and I can go and hurry and fetch all the stuff up here somehow and I’ll work as fast as I can. Indeed, I’ll try my best.”
Whereat, you see, the babe came back to him, smiling as sweetly as early Summer ever smiled. “There really isn’t such an awful hurry,” she said. “We can always have Weather, you know, and hold these things back a bit.”
That was the beginning of it.
COMMENTS:
Poetic language; but a bit of a “Pilgrim’s Progress” allegory/fable. The characters are Summer, and Voice, and Death, who visit a violinist. Old-fashioned, but it might make a wonderful artistic piece.
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