Meal ground between two granite stones by a wheel the river still turns

Two stones and a river

My great-grandfather put this wheel in during 1923, after the flood the winter before took the wooden one and half the sluice with it. It has not stood still for longer than a season since. I run it now with my son Pieter on Tuesdays and Fridays, and the stones are the same pair the old man paid for, granite cut out of the mountain behind the werf. Every six weeks or so I dress them by hand with a mill bill — sixteen furrows cut back sharp, an afternoon on my back under the runner stone with a lamp. Nobody does it that way any more, because a roller mill needs no dressing at all. That is exactly the difference. A dull stone smears the germ into the meal and you taste it in the bread three days later. — Elsabé Coetzee, miller