Half a Century on the Same Floor
Woven when the road was still a track.
Three generations of feet, one room.
The pile went low, the red went soft,
and the blue stayed exactly where she put it.
Some rugs travel and some stay, and this one stayed. It was woven in the nineteen seventies, when the road up to the village was still a mule track and electricity was something the town had, and it went down on the floor of the main room and did not come up again for fifty years. Babies learned to crawl on it. The men sat on it to eat, the women sat on it to sew, and in winter the whole family slept on it under the blankets. Fifty years of that will take the pile of any rug down to a finger's width, and it has, so that the red lies close and soft now like old velvet, while the indigo patterns have kept their edges as if they had been drawn last week.
At nearly four metres it is a rug for a big room. It has come to rest in a loft with concrete floors and tall windows, where its length finally has somewhere to go and the fifty years read as warmth rather than wear.
Handwoven rugs grow in beauty, memory, and value with every passing year.