The Blush on a Cold Morning
Minus five, and the cedars creaking,
the children's cheeks the only warm colour out.
She tied that colour into the floor
so the house would have it too.
On the high ground above Khenifra the cold comes early and stays. By November the cedars creak at dawn and the water in the trough has a skin on it, and the only warm colour anywhere outdoors is on the faces of the children sent to fetch it, cheeks gone pink with the frost. A Beni M'Guild weaver works through those months by the stove, and this rug is what she made of that colour. Most of her neighbours tied purple or red; she chose peach, deepening to rose, a rarer choice for this tribe, and set her diamonds across it with the tribe's steadiness. The pile has gone low with the years, a centimetre now, which tells you it was used rather than kept.
It lives now in a bedroom in Stockholm, on pale painted boards, with a wool blanket on the bed and a window full of birch trees, and it is the one warm thing in the room on the mornings that need it.
Handwoven rugs grow in beauty, memory, and value with every passing year.