Honey Held Up to the Window
Jars on the sill, the autumn's take,
dark gold with the light behind them.
She wanted a floor that colour
and knew which bark to boil.
The hives come down from the cedar slopes in October, and for a few weeks the windowsills of the Beni M'Guild houses are lined with jars of honey, dark and slow, the colour of cognac when the sun comes through them. The ground of this rug is that colour exactly, a warm amber brown the women of this tribe get from bark and walnut husk and patience, set with the lattice and diamonds the Beni M'Guild have always tied, here a little looser, as if the weaver were in a good mood. It is near-square, which is unusual, and the pile is a comfortable centimetre and a half, worn soft rather than worn through.
It lives now in a Berlin apartment of the old kind, double doors and a ceiling three and a half metres up, on herringbone parquet a shade lighter than the rug, and in the late afternoon, when the sun comes through the tall windows, it does what the jars did.
Handwoven rugs grow in beauty, memory, and value with every passing year.