The Pink Her Mother Chose
It was red once, the red of a wedding.
Sixty years of sun through a doorway
have made it the pink of the inside of a shell,
and nobody in the family would change it back.
This rug was tied around 1960, which makes it older than most of the women who would weave its like today, and it was almost certainly red when it came off the loom, the full madder red the Beni M'Guild keep for a marriage. Then it did what good rugs do. It went into a house, under a door that let the sun in every afternoon, and for sixty years the light worked on it patiently until the red gave way to this, a pink like the inside of a shell, warmer at the edges where the pile was thicker, paler down the middle where the family walked. You cannot dye this colour. You can only wait for it.
The wool is still deep, two fingers, and the whole rug weighs more than twenty kilos, which tells you how closely it was knotted and how well it has held. The lattice has gone soft at the lines, the way handwriting does in an old letter. It belongs in a room with nothing loud in it, a long sitting room perhaps, with oak boards and one good painting, where its colour can do the talking.
Handwoven rugs grow in beauty, memory, and value with every passing year.