Red Enough to Warm the Room
The stove went out at midnight.
Nobody got up to feed it.
The rug was red, and two fingers deep,
and that was fire enough till morning.
In a Beni M'Guild house in the seventies the stove was the centre of everything, and the rug around it was the second source of heat, because when the embers died in the small hours and nobody wanted to be the one to get up, the wool kept the floor from going cold. A red rug did that twice over. It held the warmth, and it looked like warmth, which on a February night at fifteen hundred metres is not nothing. This one was tied around 1970, two fingers deep in a madder red that has gone the colour of the embers themselves, and the lattice is drawn through it in the dark, sure lines of a woman who had made a dozen before.
It is heavy and close, eighteen kilos, and fifty years have given the pile the hand of a well-worn coat without taking the body out of it. In a house with a modern fireplace, or none at all, it does the same job it always did. It makes the room feel warmer than the thermostat says, and people cross it slowly.
Handwoven rugs grow in beauty, memory, and value with every passing year.