While Yee primarily focuses on Shelton, she seems to be telling a brief history of Domino and of the processing plant through Shelton’s experience there. The piece tells the story not just of this one sugar refinery worker, but the story of the average sugar refinery worker as well. She also uses Shelton’s experience to tell a little bit of the history of the area around the Domino plant and how it’s changed in the past couple of decades.

The profile begins in the present, with a description of the last days of the refinery, and then shifts into the past in order to tell Shelton’s story and the history of the refinery. The profile then returns to the present, explaining why Shelton is at the sugar refinery for the last time, and at the same time, it catches both his personal story and the refinery’s story up to the present.

I think the lead is excellent. It made me want to know why he’d never seen the sugar house floor, but it also filled me with mental images of an immense amount of sugar that I almost couldn’t comprehend. Overall, I thought pretty highly of it.

The nutgraf is in the second and third paragraphs on the second page, explaining why Shelton is back at the refinery and explaining what’s going to be going on there.

The author seems fairly positive about Shelton’s experience, and seems as though she, too, is wistful and sad about the closing of the refinery and the hauling away of “A Subtlety.” The whole piece has a “faded glory” or “nothing can last forever” feel to it.