Spinning a Cautionary Tale by Deborah Free

Once upon a visit to my community library, I discovered a lovely old book of fairy tales. The cover illustration was a painting of a barefoot woman pensively spinning at a wheel. Her hair, like gold ringlets of spun straw, cascaded over her shoulders. She could have been Sleeping Beauty before she pricked her finger on the spindle.
Perhaps she was the miller’s daughter considering Rumplestiltskin’s proposition. But I felt too weighted down by my own hair to ponder her identity further. At the time, I was wearing my hair in a large bun on top of my head like a McDonald’s Quarter Pounder. “If I could let my hair down and learn to spin,” I thought, “maybe I could create some enchantment of my own!”